Soulless Bastard
by onyourmark
Summary: The Devil finds a punishment that fits Sam's crime.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1, **_**Changes are Made**_

"No," said Sam, stopping just short of stamping his foot, "The problem here is that you're an _evil_, _soulless bastard_."

The Devil made that face Sam hated, the one that clearly said, _C'mon, buddy, you know me better than that._ Because Sam did know him better than that. In fact, he knew him well enough to know that for all The Devil was giving him a face that also said _This is a game_, the look in his eyes said _This is a game you have already lost_. _Badly_.

They were behind the Brick, standing next to the dumpsters. Sam had been out with the guys, celebrating another more-or-less successful soul-capture. More successful because the soul was, in fact, captured, and less successful because here was The Devil, giving him shit about it. Sam had peeked out the emergency exit looking for Sock—sometimes if there was a line for the men's room (and sometimes even if there wasn't) Sock just whizzed behind the dumpsters, and Sam was always telling him not to because homeless guys slept back here, and it wasn't cool to pee where other people had to lie down—and there was The Devil.

His complaint was kinda-sorta legit, but Sam wasn't going to admit that anytime soon. Its just the soul's girlfriend had been _so_ sad, and she had these two kids, and they were crazy about the guy. And, well, the guy was just plain crazy—he'd butchered dozens of people, Sam had watched him get ready to slice-and-dice Sock, ranting about threats to society—but even crazy people had loved ones. So he had let the soul back out one more time to say his final goodbyes. It sounded like disaster waiting to happen, and it probably was, but it had all worked out okay _this_ time. And The Devil had always been pretty focused on the here-and-now, so Sam didn't get what his damage was.

"The quality of _my_ soul isn't in question here, Sammy," said The Devil. "Remember who you're talking to. I own your soul, not the other way around."

"I wouldn't touch your soul with a ten-foot pole, asshole," Sam sneered. "Who knows where it's been."

"Ouch!" The Devil said, clutching a hand over his heart. Or where his heart would be, if he even had one. That wasn't so much a question of morality as a question of biology. "Zing! But sometimes I think you don't really grasp the gravity of our arrangement. That's understandable, of course. You're very young, still innocent and fresh-faced. And it's almost not a nauseating quality for you. But if I thought youth was a good reason to spare anybody, well, social workers and youth counselors would be out of jobs, and how would that be fair to anyone?"

In the dimness of the alley, the small glass jar The Devil brought out from behind his back shimmered dully.

"Are you threatening me with an empty jam jar?" Sam asked. "Do I smash my beer bottle against the wall and fight you hobo style? I'm sorry, I normally follow your train of thought a bit better."

The Devil laughed, and rested the palm of his hand affectionately on Sam's chest. Sam wondered why he was doomed to attract people with no respect for anyone's personal space bubble.

"Oh, Sam. You've got spunk, and I like that about you, but spunk _and_ soul seem to be inhibiting your performance as an employee of Hell. What kind of boss would I be if I let you continue work under the influence of a dangerous substance? One of the two has to go, and it just so happens that while I don't control your spunk--"

"Please stop talking about my spunk," Sam said.

"—I do have complete ownership of your soul. And I can take that away whenever I want."

Sam frowned. "Yeah, I know. You've had my soul since before I was born."

"No," The Devil said, shaking his head slightly. "I've had ownership, but up until now I was letting _you_ hold on to your soul. Your soul and your identity don't become one and the same until you shuffle off the mortal coil, you see? As a living human being…"

Sam was suddenly aware of an uncomfortable feeling where The Devil's hand was resting, like someone was smearing Vick's vapor rub there, except the feeling kept going, deep under the skin and into his chest, slick and cool.

"… You can be made to part ways, and your guts and muscle…"

Sam's eyes finally slid down to his shirt.

"… Will just keep chugging along without you," The Devil finished.

His hand was inside Sam's chest.

It was like that scene in Indiana Jones, where the crazy priest was pulling out the heart of some unfortunate native and then fire and screaming and Sam wasn't really sure, he'd only seen it once when he was ten and he'd hid his face in the arm of Sock's mom's couch while Sock laughed and told him to stop being such a little kid. Only now it was happening to _him_ and he couldn't look away, couldn't scream, couldn't do anything except gape dumbly at the point where The Devil's wrist intersected impossibly with his button-down. Inside he could feel something being moved, something sliding loose, and then The Devil's hand was withdrawing.

In his fist was a handful of fire. It was a brighter shade of blue than the gas burners on a stove, but it was definitely fire. He opened the lid of his jar and let it slide in.

Sam stared at it, his hand rubbing the spot where The Devil had just pulled out his soul. The soul in the jar lit up the whole alleyway.

"Cool," Sam said.

The Devil beamed.

--

If Sam had been asked to guess beforehand what might happen if The Devil ever separated his soul from his body, he probably would have figured that his consciousness would follow his soul. But if that had been the case, he'd be riding around in The Devil's coat pocket or sitting in a drawer or whatever right now, not lying in his own bed, staring at his alarm clock.

Not having a soul was both a lot different from having one and not really that different at all. It was different because normally he'd be upset that The Devil had dicked him over again, and not really for any good reason, but he didn't _feel_ like he was missing anything. It would have been pretty awesome if he'd become like an insane, soul-reaping zombie instead. This was fairly mundane.

Bummer.

Ben had turned the news on in the living room when Sam finally found his way to the coffee pot. All three of them were due to clock-in at the Bench in twenty minutes, but Sock still didn't have any pants on. He did have his shoes on, though, so maybe he was just going to work without pants today.

At least that would be interesting. The thought of trudging through another day at the Bench seemed more unbearable than usual. Maybe that's what a soul was for, Sam thought, making your horrible job seem worth the effort. That wasn't a very impressive function for a soul.

On the TV the newscaster was segueing from something about traffic jams to a report about breakfast.

"It's the most important meal of the day," the newscaster said with a serious-looking tilt of the head, "_but it could be killing you_."

"_I_ could be killing you, you plastic turd," Sam told the television screen. "Why do I let you breathe my oxygen?"

Sock hauled his butt up on the kitchen counter. His boxers had Batman on them, which was pretty cool, but Sam wished he wouldn't put his ass that close to Sam's face while he was eating. He dug his elbow into Sock's thigh.

"_Someone's_ in a grumpy mood today," Sock chided him. "Did you fall out of bed again? I told you, Benji and I don't mind tucking you in at night."

"Yeah, man, we're there for you," Ben said, saluting Sam with his coffee cup.

"I'm not in a bad mood," Sam said, confused.

"Nine out of ten recent studies indicate that breakfast may be the cause of our obesity crisis," declared the newscaster, concern etched into the two remaining muscles in his face that actually moved.

"YOU'RE a crisis!" Sam told the television, and threw the remote at the screen.

Ben and Sock stared.

Sam scratched his neck. He wondered if those looks they were giving him right now would bother him if he still had his soul. Oh, wait, yeah.

"Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you," Sam said, "The Devil took my soul away last night. I guess if I'm acting different, it's a side-effect? He didn't really explain anything, as usual."

Ben's mug slanted too far to the left and coffee dribbled into his lap.

"So… you know," Sam said. "Head's up."

--

The traffic jam the news had been covering, as it turned out, was on the same thruway Sam took to get to the Bench whenever he was running late. Which he was. And not that he really _wanted_ to get to the Bench, but being stuck in the Prius felt ten times worse right then, stretching out agonizing moment by agonizing moment, making his legs itch and his teeth grind against each other. God he was _so bored_, he couldn't ever remember being this _bored_, it was like _torture_. He wished he could at least _see_ the accident that was turning what should be a five-minute commute into a twenty-minute-long death march; at least then there would be people getting arrested or bleeding or, fuck, anything. He'd even take people arguing about insurance information over this.

"Well," Ben said, "At least we're in a hybrid, right? Like, we're killing the earth a little _less_."

"Right on, Benji," said Sock, pumping his fist. "There may be like a thousand cars with their engines running all around us, but it only takes one man to make a difference. We can be that one man. _Together_."

"I wish something would explode," Sam said, digging his fingers into his face. "Because I am going to die of boredom otherwise."

"Um," said Ben.

"Haha, ha, yeah," Sock said nervously. "And then other people would die. Of… not boredom."

Ben shifted uncomfortably. "Yeah, Sam, you have to be careful. You have those crazy reaper powers; one day wishing something might make it true."

Sam waved his hands at the dashboard. "I wish my Prius had monster truck wheels!"

Nothing happened.

Sam threw a pointed look at Ben. "Nope, not today," he sighed. "Better luck next time."

Then a miracle happened. Nothing changed in the outside world, but a light clicked on in Sam's brain. He gasped and sat up straight. Sock and Ben got, if possible, even more nervous-looking.

"_The grass_," Sam said, gesturing.

"Is it… talking to you?" Sock guessed.

"Nobody drives on the grass!" Sam cried, getting more excited. "There's not even a guardrail here, and it's flat all the way up to the turn-off near the Bench! It's genius, I don't know why everyone else isn't doing it!"

"Um, because you're not supposed to?" Ben said, but it was too late, Sam was already pulling out onto grassy barrier between the North- and South-bound lanes. It only took moments for the other drivers on the road to realize what Sam was up to, and by then he was already accelerating.

Then the honking started.

Fortunately the accident, and thus the central knot of the traffic, was a good thirty yards short of their turn-off, because Sam hadn't really thought far enough ahead to reach the point where he would need to cross back through those two lanes of congested traffic he had just swiftly bypassed. And also fortunately, the accident in question was a pretty nasty-looking affair and there weren't enough cops on the scene for any of them to bother doing more than shouting and waving angrily and Sam swerved around their squad cars, spitting up turf and rocks onto the charred remains of a school bus.

"IS THIS ROAD RAGE?" Ben asked over the hundred-car horn chorus Sam was inciting. "IT FEELS LIKE ROAD RAGE, BUT YOU'RE LAUGHING TOO HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE THAT YOU'RE REALLY ANGRY."

It was good to be alive.

--

Thirty minutes later, it was less good to be alive. The Work Bench's time clock rounded up in sets of fifteen, so being one minute late was as bad as being fourteen, and, in Sam's case, being forty-five-and-a-half minutes late was as bad as being an hour late.

"It's okay, fellas," Ted said bracingly. "You can just work through your break."

"I'll break _you_," Sam snarled under his breath when Ted turned to leave them, standing among the fruits of a two-pallet shipment of ornamental door-knockers.

"What was that?" Ted asked, swiveling his head around so fast Ben winced in sympathy.

Sam narrowed his eyes. "I said--"

"—Thank you!" Sock blurted. "He said, 'I'll _thank you_,' Ted." He laughed nervously.

"Yeah, don't you have, like, three inspirational posters about teamwork and manners and all that… good stuff?" Ben chimed in.

For the first time, Sam could clearly see what was going on in Ted's head. Normally Ted's thought-processes were so obscured to Sam by a difference of mindset that Sam actually wondered if Ted _had_ thought-processes, or if he just had a series of syllogistic commands programmed into him by some company-sponsored brainwashing retreat. But now everything was illuminated by the same small light that had flickered on in Sam's brain out on the thruway, and Sam finally understood both what had to happen here and how to make it happen.

He smiled shyly. Ted's stare flickered uncertainly.

"Yeah, I mean," Sam started, rubbing his neck, "I know other managers would really take us to task for that and I appreciate that you're letting us be flexible with our schedules."

He stared at his shoes for effect.

"We should really learn to manage our time better."

Ted clapped his hands in satisfaction. "Good! Exactly! Remember," he pointed at them with both fingers and tilted his head in the same serious way the newscaster had earlier that morning. "You don't learn anything about sea-travel if your parachute is only one color."

"My granddad used to say that," said Ben knowingly.

Ted left.

"Your granddad was senile," Sock replied.

--

Sam hadn't been totally conscious of formulating a plan after talking to Ted, but never the less his plan went into motion in the Bath Fixtures aisle two hours later, while he was standing on the lid of a floorshow toilet to reach the top row of novelty bathroom hooks. The top ones were creepy fingers, crooked in permanent come-hither gestures, and Sam was arranging them to look even creepier, because if you were going to sell tasteless things you might as well go all the way.

"Excuse me," said someone standing behind Sam, just to the left of the padded toilet seat display. Craning his neck around without letting go of the bath hooks, he could just make out the brow of a man in his mid-forties, his balding head reflecting the fluorescent lights. Sam turned fully around to get a better look, intrigued by this opportunity to not be so bored it felt like his brain was trying to escape from his head.

"Can I help you, sir?" he said, and crossed his fingers behind his back. _Please be something involving explosions or driving the forklift_, he thought fervently.

"Yes, yes you can," said a small woman, skittering in mysteriously from the direction of the fancy shower curtains display and taking the man's arm in hers. "We were just looking at ceiling fans, and we think we're ready to make our final decision but we'd like some assistance." She cocked her head and smiled, saying with her body language,_ if you'll just follow me and listen to me remake my decision eight times for twenty minutes and pretend to give a crap about ceiling fans?_

Why did they even have a ceiling fan aisle? Who bought ceiling fans anymore? Off the top of his head Sam could think of at least four things to do with the middle of your ceiling that were less of a waste than ceiling fans. Creepy marionette display, large disorienting mirror, meat hanger, disco ball. Bam! Why were people so _boring_.

He smiled weakly and glanced up at the security cameras Ted had made him install. They fed into a monitor in the security booth, but no one went into the security booth unless the store had reason to believe someone was actively trying to sneak a hot tub or lawnmower out of the store. He glanced back at the couple and tossed out his best apologetic grimace.

"I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to move from this spot." He gestured vaguely at the toilet lid he was still standing on. He liked it, it made him feel tall.

The woman gave him a small, disbelieving shake of her head. "It'll only take a moment! No one will even know."

The man gave him a big, cheery wink. "We won't tell if you don't." That was almost skeevy enough to convince Sam to follow them and keep making child abduction jokes until they got uncomfortable and left, but not quite.

Sam made another show of warily eyeing the security cameras, in case Mr. and Mrs. Obsolete Home Décor hadn't picked up on that the first time. They looked confused. He decided to be generous and help. "The cameras," he clarified, leaning in cautiously. "They watch us _always_."

Mrs. Obsolete Home Décor bobbed her head back disbelievingly again, like an agitated chicken. Suddenly this was way more fun than orchestrating disturbing bath hardware displays.

"One time my manager told me to stay with the designer-brand citronella candles, and when I left to use the bathroom he was _furious_," he elaborated. "The next day he made me spend a whole ten-hour shift with it, and I passed out from the fumes. Fell face-first into the Astroturf on our camping supplies display. I'm not allowed to take breaks anymore." Sam spread out his hands in supplication. "But you don't hear me complaining. I've got it easy. But most of the others here are migrant workers, and I worry about them. The manager locks them in the garden supply shed at night to keep them from trying to leave before they've repaid their debts to the coyote that brought them here."

Mr. Obsolete had hunched his shoulders all of the way forward, leaning towards Sam in conspiracy. Mrs. Obsolete's head had frozen at an improbable angle at some point during her chicken-head-bobbing.

Sam pointed at Ben, who was arranging plastic flamingos in a fan around a circle of garden gnomes. "My friend Benji escaped brutal political oppression in… um, Guatemala. He sends every penny he earns to the orphans he grew up with, but he hasn't set foot off Work Bench property in nearly two years and sometimes at night he cries for the loss of his beautiful homeland."

Mrs. Obsolete had her hand pressed against her mouth. Sam went in for his punch line.

"And my friend Sock? He's been working here since this store was a Home Depot, back in '91. His mother wanted to send him to America to escape Communism in the Soviet, but the people she paid to transport him to safety sold him to the management for fifteen American dollars, and he's been here ever since." Sam nodded tragically. "He knows no life but the life of home supply retail."

"How does no one know about this?" Mrs. Obsolete asked, every line of her body language speaking to complete and utter dismay and total, unshakeable faith in a sales associate she had just met.

"They do," Sam intoned, glancing once again at the cameras. "But no one wants to admit there's a problem. Without us, Seattle's economic structure would fail. Where do you think coffee house baristas come from?" He shook his head. "I've already said too much. If Ted sees me talking to you for this long, he'll get suspicious again. I'm sorry I can't help you with your…" Sam had to reach far, far back into his memory. "… ceiling fan."

On their way out of the store, Mrs. Obsolete Home Décor stopped next to Ben (now angling lawn jockeys symmetrically), rifled through her purse, and, holding back tears, handed him a crisp fifty. Then she and Mr. Obsolete hurried out through the automatic doors.

Ben turned to stare incredulously at Sam. Then he stared back down at the bill in his hand. The plastic flamingoes all collapsed simultaneously.

Sock crawled out of a hot tub on Sam's right.

"That was amazing!" he marveled. "Oh man, Sam, I am so sorry I thought you were possessed by an evil spirit before in the car," he said, wrapping his arms around Sam's waist. "It's like you're the best friend I always wanted now, instead of the best friend I made do with because I was scared I would break you by accident!"

Sam raised an eyebrow. If he'd still had his soul that might have offended him, but now it was kind of funny.

"What did you _do_?" Ben asked, still holding the bill in his hand. "You didn't promise them I'd do something, did you? Is this gonna be like that time I had to dig holes in some lady's yard for three days? I don't think I can handle it if both my best friends are Socks now."

"You don't have to do anything, Ben," Sam reassured him. "That's money for all those orphans you grew up with in Guatemala."

"Sam here just pulled the conniest con ever in Work Bench history!" Sock crowed. "I couldn't have gotten two sentences into that load of crap before they woulda' called the cops on me, but they _totally bought it_!"

"It wasn't a con," Sam corrected, fists on his hips, eyeing the two of them from his vantage point. "It was the beginning of revolution."

Sock cocked his head. Ben looked worried.

"Things," Sam said with a smile, "are going to change."

--

Unfortunately for Sam, the next step on the road to change was in Ted's hands, and until Ted figured that out Sam was stuck amusing himself.

… Actually, this was mostly okay by Sam now that he had figured out _how_ to amuse himself, but Ted would be regretting it later, particularly when he went to investigate why the sprinkler system in the Garden Center wasn't turning on and off automatically anymore. Sam had already greased every doorknob in the store, got every television in the Media Center to pick up Pay Per View and strategically hidden Ben's garden gnomes in dark, secluded corners. It was like the whole world was an amazing playground of opportunity now that he no longer had a soul to worry about, although for the life of him Sam couldn't quite place his finger on why there would be such a differ—_whoa_ there was a hand in his face.

Sam pulled his head back in surprise. The hand belonged to Andi. She was looking at him oddly.

"Was this you?" she asked in disbelief.

Sam re-examined the palm of her hand. It was smeared with dark, greasy oil.

"Only if it got that way after you tried to turn a doorknob. If you just woke up like that I can't help you." Sam paused. "I forget, is that one of the things that's supposed to happen if you masturbate too much? Or was that just hair?"

Andi frowned at him, but it was still mostly a confused, half-smiling type of frown, and Sam could work with that. "I can't get it _off_," she said.

"I guess that would be a motivation to keep trying, but I don't want you to go blind, too," Sam replied.

"Sam!" she laughed, which was better, although the frown was still there. "Seriously, what brand did you use? I don't want to just try pouring paint thinners on my skin, you know?"

Sam shrugged. "I kind of mixed them all together. I also coated the ramp on the loading dock, before I leave I'm going to set it on fire and see what happens."

Andi stared. The laughter/frowning ratio had swung sharply against Sam's favor.

"Um," Sam said, and tried to think of a way to fix this. He grabbed her palm and sprinkled some of his glitter on her grease stain. "There! Now your hand's still dirty, but it's got sparkles on it. Who doesn't like sparkles, right?"

Still staring.

"Now when you high-five people, you spread the sparkle love!" Sam said, spreading his arms. "Nobody really high-fives anymore, but this could be your chance to bring it back, Andi!"

"Why… do you have glitter?" she asked, looking at him with something akin to calculation.

Sam gestured at the Garden Center's sprinkler system, which he had been pouring glitter into. "Spreading the sparkle love. I think Ted would look good covered in glitter, don't you?"

"Sam," she said slowly, "Ben said he thought you might be sick. And Sock said he thinks you might have 'amazing super powers' now. What's going _on_?"

Sam tried to think of a lie that wouldn't upset her, because he was pretty sure _I have no soul_ would reduce his chances of getting laid to nil, and possibly encourage her call the cops on him, or the psych ward. "I… uh, attained enlightenment the other day," he tried. "Now my consciousness exists on a higher plane, unaffected by trivial concerns?" This was good, especially because it was kind of true, but she didn't look like she was buying it. Sam wondered what the difference was between Andi and Mr. & Mrs. Obsolete. Exposure to Sock, probably.

Then the voice of God rescued him.

"SAM OLIVER TO MANAGEMENT," Ted's voice boomed over the store's PA system. "SAM OLIVER TO MANAGEMENT _RIGHT NOW_."

Sam laughed in relief. Andi was still looking at him weird, but she would probably get over it. "Well, I guess I have to go have a little pow-wow with Ted, now. Here," he handed her the glitter. "Finish my good works."

"He's going to fire you if you're not careful, Sam," Andi called at his retreating back.

"No, he won't," Sam assured her. "Things are going to change!"

--

"Oh Ted," Sam said, leaning through the door of Ted's office. "Hearing your voice is my reason to continue living."

"Shut the door, Oliver," Ted said tightly, gripping the armrests of his swivel chair.

"I thought you'd never ask!" Sam cried, shutting the door and pulling the blinds with a flourish. Ted's face flushed a dull red. He wrapped both hands around his empty _Best Boss_ coffee mug—Sam was pretty sure he had bought that for himself— as if he could simultaneously use it to keep from strangling Sam and use it as a protective shield between them. Sam thought about smashing it over Ted's head and just being done with it, but decided to leave that as a last resort. Instead he sat on the edge of the desk and leaned forward eagerly, surreptitiously knocking over Ted's Motivational Quote of the Day calendar. Ted made a face and compulsively straightened it.

With his free hand he pointed at Sam once again, but this time there was no newscaster head-tilt, just a fierce scowl. "I just received a very interesting phone call, Mr. Oliver. From a local labor and civil rights organization." Ted paused to grit his teeth. "They're threatening to investigate this branch of The Bench. Apparently someone out there thinks we're abusing our employees." Ted cocked his head and gave Sam the crazy eye. Ted did a pretty convincing crazy eye. "Why do I have a feeling you're somehow involved in this?"

"Oh _man_, Ted," Sam said forcefully. He made a distressed face. "I had no idea this would go this far. I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking."

Ted's crazyeye turned into a _you're crazy? _eye.

"I was just talking to some customers while I was helping them, and it came up in conversation that I was working through my break today," Sam said apologetically. "They kept pressing the issue and I wasn't really thinking anything of it. You know how activist types get, they kind of fixate, right?"

Ted made his confused face. "Someone is threatening legal action against us because you're skipping your _lunch break_?"

"I know, I know!" Sam said. "I mean, I mentioned some other stuff, but it sounds like they really took it, you know, out of context."

"_What other stuff_?" Ted asked, eyes narrowed.

"Well, it's really none of my business. It's just something that we've all noticed about you, and sometimes it's a little uncomfortable. But that's my damage, right? I mean, I'm totally tolerant." Ted blanched. "It just gets a little weird when you, you know, forget yourself."

Ted stared at him. "What are you talking about?"

Sam looked at him sympathetically. "Ted, I know about Eagle Scouts."

Ted gasped. "Bobby said he'd never tell anyone about that!" Sam had been shooting in the dark there, but apparently not having a soul gave him metaphorical Daredevil powers, like a bat's sonar bouncing off of hidden repression. Sock was right, this _was_ like having amazing super powers.

"And you're kind of, you know, obvious sometimes," Sam said, glancing over his shoulder to check on the door. "I mean, you _are_ my boss, so I guess if you really _want_…" Sam put his hand on Ted's knee.

Ted's whole face was red again, which was an interesting thing to see. "I can't—employee relations, I—don't want to be inappropriate." His voice cracked on the _o_ in _inappropriate_. This was too easy.

"It's kind of too late for that, Ted," Sam said. "Everyone's seen how you look at me. Most people already think we're doing it, which has been a little awkward for me, lemme tell you." He smiled sadly for a moment, then stopped and widened his eyes. "I really hope those labor organization people don't talk to anyone who works here. It'd be hard to convince them otherwise after they talked to enough people all telling the same story, right?" Ted's face cycled back to white for a second time. "That'd be pretty embarrassing, huh," Sam said.

"Oh sweet fancy Moses," Ted said, raising his hand to his face.

"But I mean, hey," Sam offered, "It's my word that really counts, right? So as long as I say nothing happened, there's not much they can do."

Ted didn't seem to really be listening anymore. Both of his hands were pressed to his face and he was staring at his Motivational Calendar with a look of dull terror. "I'll be ruined," he whispered. "All of my hopes and dreams, crushed."

"… Yeah," said Sam.

"If something like this gets out, I'll never rise above managerial position."

Sam had no real idea what was _above_ being the manager at the Work Bench, but whatever. "It would be a tragic loss for the entire organization," he agreed.

Ted focused on Sam again. "This has to stay between us, okay, Sam?"

Sam made an uncertain face. "Are you still gonna be all, you know?"

Ted had never actually been _all, you know_, not really, but Ted obviously didn't know that, because he quickly pulled back the hand that had been resting on the desk next to Sam's thigh and looked guilty. So guilty Sam idly wondered if Ted actually had been hitting on him and he just hadn't noticed. "No," Ted said quickly. "There will be none of that. I just have to, ah. Well, I'll figure something out."

"Thanks," Sam said. "Maybe I should just stay out of your way? Except you're kind of always here, and it would suck if I had to cut down on my hours because of, you know."

"No, no," Ted said. "I'll take care of it. You just do what you have to do to be a happy, productive employee. A pride of lions can't change a zebra's stripes without looking at the sun."

Sam smiled. "I'm glad we had this talk, Ted." He slapped Ted on the shoulder. Ted looked uncomfortable. "You're the best boss I've ever had."

Ted looked confused again. "I'm the only boss you've ever had."

"Um," said Sam. "Right."


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2, **_**Divine Intervention**_

The first thing Ben did the next morning was pray. He'd been too conflicted the night before—he'd just treated an ecstatic Sock and a worryingly and uncharacteristically even more ecstatic Sam to a couple rounds at the Brick with his ill-gotten money, and it didn't feel right to be talking to God with that on his conscience. Plus he hadn't prayed or been to church in, well, a while. But in the night he'd dreamt of burning plastic flamingoes and Sam commanding an army of demonic garden gnomes, the horns of a ram growing from his skull. After that the situation seemed clearer.

"Hi, Jesus," Ben said, kneeling next to his bed with his hands folded. "Listen, I know we haven't been on speaking terms in a while, and I want you to know that's not because I don't have faith in you, 'cause if anything these past few months have totally convinced me of your existence." He squirmed a little, trying to think of how to phrase this next part. "But it's just seemed so unfair lately, like your love and protection weren't as equally-distributed as Grandma always said they were. My friend Sam never did anything wrong before now, except for being kind of directionless and that one time he lied to a police officer… but that was because we were going to be late for the _Revenge of the Sith_ premiere and he felt bad about it later."

Ben took a deep breath. "But you've totally turned your back on one of your own, because of some stupid loophole the Devil must have found. How can anyone sell someone else's soul? You should have protected him from that. And he's been doing okay on his own, but now something's gone even more wrong and he really needs your love and guidance." Ben raised his eyes heavenward. "I'm only sayin' it because I have faith it's in your power to save Sam. I don't want him to burn in Hell, and I especially don't want him to _deserve_ to burn in Hell."

Ben tried to think if there was anything else he forgot to add.

"Oh yeah, and please don't smite Sock for taking your name in vain all of the time. Amen."

In the kitchen while the coffee was brewing, Ben tried to fix the TV. When Sam had inadvertently—or advertently, Ben wasn't 100 certain—muted it the other morning he must have smashed an incredibly complicated set of buttons on the remote, because Ben couldn't figure out how to turn the sound back on. He did figure out how to turn the subtitles on, so that was almost as good, even though the closed captioning was a little wonky sometimes. And Sock wouldn't like having to read to know what was going on, but Sock had a weird talent for this kind of thing. He'd probably smash all the buttons on the remote again and it would be fixed.

That's when Ben noticed that something was missing.

Sock wandered into the room, wearing pants this time but with his shirt unbuttoned, which was weirdly almost worse.

"Sock," said Ben. "Have you seen the couch cushions?"

"Bllhh?" Sock grunted, fumbling with the coffee pot.

"Where are the couch cushions."

Sock paused. "Oh! Oh, I know this one, Benji." He opened the cabinet to get a coffee mug. "Try _on the couch_." He chose the mug that said "#1 Mom" on it, which he'd covertly stolen from his mother, declaring that she no longer deserved it. "Which is the couch cushion's natural habitat," he clarified.

Ben frowned. "They're not on the couch."

"Yeah, sorry about that," said Sam from the front door. He was barefoot and wearing his pajamas. "I didn't want to get my mattress gross. Also I think it's too big to fit in the elevator."

Sock made a confused, unintelligible noise. Sam stole his coffee.

"Where…" Ben started, had to stop to collect himself, and then continued. "Where are they?"

"On the roof," Sam said casually.

In the span of silence that reigned supreme for the next thirty seconds, Sam walked away with Sock's coffee and poured himself a bowl of cereal. Ben realized he also had the newspaper with him, which was nice but also meant Sam had wandered somewhere far enough from their condo to buy a newspaper, barefoot and in his Captain America pajama pants. Or he had stolen it from one of their neighbors who got the newspaper delivered, which seemed more likely now that Ben thought about it.

"You put our couch cushions on the roof?" Sock blurted.

Ben covered his eyes with his hands. "Are they still up there?"

"Yef," said Sam through a mouthful of fruit loops.

"Well, could you go get them, and bring them back?" Ben said impatiently.

Sam nodded. "I'll go get them when I'm done eating."

"_How could you not come get me if you were going to camp out on the roof_?" Sock cried.

"You need to go get them now, Sam," Ben said, "We have to be at the Bench in, like, twenty minutes and you're not even dressed yet, and I don't care what you did to Ted yesterday, he's going to have to actually leave his office sometime today and he's gonna bust our asses if we're late again."

Sam rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to work today, don't worry about it."

"You're not _what_?" Sock said.

"Yeah," Sam said, "It's cool, watch." He sorted through the pile of junk on the end of the kitchen counter and pulled out his cell phone. Ben and Sock watched blankly while he flicked through his contacts, then put the phone up to his ear. Sam raised a finger for silence, even though they weren't talking, or even breathing loudly.

"Hey, Ted," Sam said into the phone. Sock startled. "Are you okay?" Sam said, to Ted, apparently. "Yeah, I noticed that… I'm fine, I guess. But I think I need today for myself, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking I might go to their offices, try to find those people." Sam laughed at something. Sock looked nauseous. "I'm just worried, you know? I have rent to pay and everyth—really? Isn't that against company policy?"

Even across the room, Ben could see the glint in Sam's eye at this. It was unhealthy looking.

"Yeah, I guess so. This is really understanding of you, though. Uh-huh. Yeah, thanks. Okay, take care of yourself, Ted. Bye."

Sam flipped his phone shut and smiled widely at them.

"'_Take care of yourself, Ted'_?" Sock mimicked. "What the hell, man! What happened to change! You promised me change!"

Sam gestured impatiently with his phone. "Are you kidding? Ted just told me he's going to put me on the clock for an eight-hour shift today, and I don't even have to show up."

"But not change that matters to me, you dick!" Sock shouted. "This is even worse! I don't want to be stuck at the Bench alone!"

"Hey!" said Ben.

"Sorry, Benji," Sock said. "It's just, you know, you sometimes get work done."

"I do not," Ben said, offended.

Sam sighed. "I'm working on it, okay? But I'm easing Ted into this. Later when I've got some really good blackmail on him, we'll all be totally set. But I can't rush this."

"You sound like you're fucking him," Sock spat.

"No," Sam laughed, "But he thinks I think he wants me to."

"You traitor," Sock said. "You're sucking up to the enemy! I liked you better when Ted scared you a little bit and you were too lazy to plan anything without me goading you on!"

Ben crossed the room and leaned towards Sam over the counter. "Sam," he said, "If you had a soul still, what would it be telling you to do?"

At first Sam just looked confused, as if he had forgotten he no longer had a soul… and then a strange look passed over his face. He gasped, staring at the counter in realization. Ben leaned closer. Sock's look of betrayal disappeared.

"Oh my god," Sam said. He stared out the window. Then he looked back at the two of them.

"_Today is the perfect day to play skeeball_," he whispered.

Sock groaned in defeat. Ben hung his head.

God had better work fast.

--

Skeeball, as it turned out, was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Or what the doctor _should_ have ordered, if any doctor had been privy to the uncontrollable rollercoaster that was Sam's recent impulse problem. Since losing his soul Sam was having a hard time anticipating himself; wants were indistinguishable from needs and minor annoyance and burning rage garnered pretty much the same reaction. That was how he had ended up on the roof the night before, sprawled out under the stars on the couch cushions and humming vaguely to himself until two o'clock in the morning. It wasn't exactly like what fear had felt like before, just more of a vague itch under his skin that had made him worry the walls of his bedroom were about to crush him. Sam had thought about warning Ben and Sock to leave the apartment before it folded in on itself and killed them all, but it had been past midnight by the time he'd moved to the roof, and he hadn't wanted to wake them up over something that was probably only him finally going completely insane.

It had been totally awesome to come back to the apartment the next morning and discover them still alive and unsquished. Having to find new friends would have been a real pain in the ass.

But now Sam had totally found his center again, and that center was the two-hundred point hole in skeeball, and Sam was going to nail that motherfucker with all ten balls if it was the last thing he did.

"_Excuse_ me, but I believe it is _my_ turn," one of the kids said.

"Timmy--" Sam started.

"_Tammy_," she scowled.

"—Whatever, listen, they clearly haven't taught you about hierarchies in school yet, but I am at the top of this one, and you need to shut your face before I take you to the security booth and leave you there with that scary, asthmatic security guard."

They all pouted. There were, like, twelve of them. Sam wished they'd wander off and get abducted by perverts or killed on rides, or whatever it was kids were supposed to do at theme parks.

"Now somebody give me another token," Sam said. They glared at him balefully. "C'mon, people, let's go!" he said, clapping his hands. "When one of you bastards can _spell_ hierarchy, maybe I'll let you have a turn."

This was _so_ taxing. Sam was almost tempted to buy his own friggin' tokens, but that would mean leaving his spot in front of the only functioning skeeball ramp, and then he'd never be able to relax.

"You're supposed to be our chaperone," said one of the ones in the back. "So chaperone!"

"You were supposed to be an abortion, creepy ten-year-old," Sam sneered, "So abort, and leave me the hell alone!"

"We're sixth-graders," Timmy said snottily. "We're all at least eleven."

"Well, mazel-tov, bitch!" Sam replied. "I guess you're adults now, you don't need me to help you have fun. Go steal things from the gift-shop."

They stormed out of the arcade into the sunlight. Sam sighed. It would have been better if they'd stuck around and just been quiet; being a chaperone was technically his cover. The park wasn't open to the public for another half-hour, and he'd snuck in without paying admission by pretending to be a student teacher.

Whatever, Sam couldn't find it in himself to worry with skeeball so close to his fingertips. He went to the token machine and pulled his wallet out, then groaned. For the love of fuck. The thing only exchanged quarters, and Sam only had two tens and a lot of fucking pennies.

Sam thought about just breaking the machine and taking all the tokens he would ever need, but he'd get kicked out even faster that way. He peered outside. He couldn't ask anyone here for change with his charges wandering around on their own. Sam pulled at his hair in frustration; it felt like he was _dying_.

Sam's eyes narrowed. Two people were leaning on the other side of the park's fence, near the locker room. They didn't look like employees on a smoke break. Sam glanced around and then jogged over, trying to look inconspicuous and like he was totally not not-supposed-to-be-there.

"Hey, do either of you have change for a ten?" he asked through the fence, looping his fingers in the chain-link. The skinny one looked up and smiled.

"Nah, brah, it's still beginning of business hours. You looking to score a little something to make those pussy rides not totally boring? Me and Silent Bob," he said, nodding to his friend, "We can hook your ass up."

"You're drug dealers?" Sam sad flatly, raising his eyebrow. "Outside of _Fun Forest_?"

Silent Bob shrugged, seeming embarrassed. The other one bristled. "Hey, fuck you, yuppie bitch. This place is dead now, but in a few hours there'll be mad bored hipsters here, just begging for some of this fine Jamaican we're sellin'."

"You guys aren't from around here, are you?" Sam said calmly.

"Fuck no," said the blonde guy. "We're on our way to Portland. We wouldn't be caught dead in this hell-hole!"

Sam raised one eyebrow. "You have _no_ idea. Lemme see a dime-bag."

The guy flashed it under his coat, all secretive-like. Sam scoffed. "You're kidding, right? This is Seattle. We've had legalized medical marijuana since I was a kid. Give me twice that for ten bucks and I'll consider it." They both looked at him, aghast. "Seriously," Sam said, "Nobody trusts street sellers here unless there's a 'fest in town, you idiots. You're not going to sell any of that to anyone else."

He looked around at the theme park. "_Especially_ not here." He pulled a ten out.

The blonde guy scowled and snatched it. Sam grabbed onto his coat sleeve hard to make sure he didn't run off, and the big guy did something like growling, but without making any noise. "Chill, brah," the blonde one said. "Take your fuckin' weed. Don't know who you're gonna smoke it with, though. This place is dead. C'mon, Silent Bob, let's find another place to do business."

They tottered off towards Mercer. Sam rolled his eyes and tucked both baggies into his pocket. Then he looked around him.

Those kids had to be around here somewhere.

--

Sam had found them hiding on the other side of the pavilion, which was perfect, and once he'd apologized and given them some lame spiel about how he realized that eleven totally was too old to have fun at some dumpy play-park with only three good rides, well, it wasn't so much like taking candy from babies as _giving_ candy to babies, which was probably even easier than the first thing. And then he did kinda-sorta also take candy from babies, if you replaced "candy" here with "forty dollars worth of tokens."

Sam was an awesome business man. He couldn't remember why he'd always hated selling stuff at the Bench before.

And skeeball was totally the greatest thing ever invented by man. The only thing even remotely close to better was chili-cheese dogs, which Sam could finally go buy now that the park was fully open and there were other people here over five-feet tall. And also one of those huge, gross slushy things. _Nothing about this day has had any down-side_, Sam thought deliriously. _That's never happened to me before._

Naturally, this was when he tripped over the vessel.

"Crap," Sam said earnestly. He stared down at the box. There was a black portfolio resting on top. Sam looked around.

"Hello?" he said. "Hellooooooo-oooo." A couple of people glanced at him from their picnic table. "Come out, come out, wherever you are, you bronzer-hording freak!"

One of the security guards was staring at him, and it looked like the family at the picnic table was considering moving elsewhere, but no Devil in sight. Huh.

Sam picked up the box and carried it around the back of the pavilion, passing his toked-out kids on the way. He dropped the vessel box on the ground and opened the portfolio. "Helloooooo," he tried again, "where are you?"

He could hear confused druggie laughter coming from the direction of his kids, but other than that, nothing. "You're not _mad_ at me, are you?" Sam said into thin air. "Because if anyone should be mad right now, I think it's me, and, ironically, considering I no longer have a soul, I am feeling pretty forgiving about this whole thing."

Silence.

"You're a dick, and I hate you," Sam said with finality, and settled down on the ground to read the new escaped soul's profile.

--

Sock and Ben were breaking down cardboard boxes for the dumpster when Sam finally found them, which meant one person held the box up and the other person punched through the bottom. The punching person was usually Sock, because he had the natural advantage of having hands "like Christmas hams with an adamantium skeleton inside." The person holding the box was usually Sam, because Ben was smart enough to know that one out of every ten punches was going to go far enough through the box to hit the other person in the gut.

"Well, look who decided to show up at work," Sock sneered, "The _traitor_." Then he punched through a box so hard Ben fell over, fortunately onto a pile of un-punched boxes.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Don't even start. I just spent ten minutes literally holding Ted's hand, isn't that punishment enough?"

"No, it is not enough!" Sock said. "It makes it worse. Do you know who he blames for all of that awesome, amazing stuff you did yesterday? _Me_. Me, Sam! And don't get me wrong, I would love to be able to take credit for the sheer genius of The Glitter Incident," he paused to inhale here, "but NOT IF IT MEANS SPENDING FOUR HOURS CLEANING THAT GLITTER UP," he bellowed, and threw the cardboard box at Sam.

Sam blinked.

"LOOK AT ME!" Sock shrieked. "_I'm covered in it_!"

"It's true," Ben said bleakly.

"But Sock," Sam said, laughing a little, "You used to do that all the time in fifth period art class, remember? And then you would say, '_Look at me, I'm Tinkerbell_!' and run around shoving people down stairs and telling them to think happy thoughts."

"This is_ different_," Sock said coldly.

"I'm sorry?" Sam said, because he seemed to recall that working before, in the increasingly hazy, distant-seeming past where he'd had a soul. "But listen, I have an awesome reason for you to stop being weird and angry right now," he said impatiently, waving the portfolio. "Look what _I've_ got."

"You've got unnecessarily-classy office supplies, that's supposed to fix things _how_?" Sock sneered.

"It's the escaped soul, dumbass," said Ben, getting up. "Did you talk to The Devil, Sam? Did he say anything about your soul?"

Sam grimaced. "No, I think he's mad at me, or else I'm boring to him now that his stupid jokes probably wouldn't bother me anymore. He didn't show up."

"Sam," Ben said, "I really think you should try to get in touch with The Devil and discuss this with him."

"Sure, Ben," Sam sighed, "I'll just shine the Bat Signal into the night sky and he'll come running. Either he shows up or he doesn't," he shrugged, "I don't really have any power over that."

"Did you ever wonder what happened if they needed Batman during the day?" Sock said idly, distracted. "You'd think all of the criminals in Gotham would just decide to commit crimes during their lunch break, and problem solved. Bats is too busy macking on hot chicks and stuff to care."

"I don't think it would have made any difference," Sam replied. "He's Batman, he'd just find you the next night and kick your ass anyway."

"Did I say I was talking to you, traitor?" Sock said, and then snatched the soul's portfolio away from him. "Gimme that, you'll hurt yourself if we let you do this stuff on your own… oh my god, _awesome_."

"I told you," said Sam smugly. "You won't believe what the vessel is. This is going to be awesome, like being in _The Exorcist_, but we don't get thrown down a flight of stairs and die at the end." He paused. "Probably."

"Who's the soul?" Ben asked, leaning over Sock's shoulder.

"A priest!" Sock cried. "A Catholic priest! Oh man, I have always wanted to send a priest to Hell."

"Oh no," Ben moaned. "I can't believe this. I'm gonna be trapped in limbo for centuries when I die."

"He's not a real priest, Ben," Sam said, "He was a con artist. He lied about being a priest so he could perform 'exorcisms,'" Sam made air quotes, looking more amused than anything, "On his victims. And as funny as that kind of is? You're totally gonna earn brownie points with the big guy for helping me put his caboose on the tracks to Hell."

"Plus, he's hiding at a convent," Sock said. "He's surrounded by nuns. Haven't you ever seen _Sound of Music_, Benji? Nuns can be totally hot under those wacky robe things, _and_," he gestured to his crotch, "they _love_ packages."

"Tied up with string," Ben countered flatly.

"Those nuns are married to God now, Sock," Sam said, smiling. "If you get too frisky with 'em he might smite you with lightning."

"Like you even care," Sock sneered.

"Chill, Sock," said Ben. "It's not like he can help it. Getting angry at him for being a dick right now would be like getting angry at someone with Tourette's for cursing or… or autistic kids for not looking you in the eye. He's disabled."

Sam looked confused. "I don't feel disabled."

"Of course you don't," Ben said tiredly. "But you are, and because we're your friends we're going to help you get through this, but you have to trust us, okay?"

Sam tilted his head. "Okay, but if you screw me over, I'll slaughter both of you in your sleep."

Sock and Ben stared.

Sam stared back.

"Uh," squeaked Sock.

"I'm kidding!" Sam said with a big smile, spreading his arms and laughing.

"Ohhh, haha, ha, ha," Sock laughed nervously. "Ha! Good one."

Ben scrunched his whole face up and muttered something under his breath about Jesus, then squared his shoulders and looked at Sam. "Alright, our shift's over in an hour—we can go scope out the convent then."

"No, no," Sam said, "We can go now, Ted's not going to notice, trust me."

"Why?" Sock asked making a pained face as he took off his apron. "You didn't leave him in a post-coital state, did you? If you went that far we're going to have to fire-cleanse Ted's office, and disinfect you somehow."

"Sock, just because I don't have a _soul_ doesn't mean I don't have _standards_," Sam said, then waved them back over when they turned towards the front of the store. "No, come on, we're exiting out the side-door, I parked one street over."

"_Why_?" said Ben.

"You'll see."

And they did see, a few minutes later as the Prius drove past the Work Bench parking lot.

"_I've set them free_!" Sam said proudly, letting go of the steering wheel long enough to do jazz hands.

"Okay, I take back everything I said about you being a traitor," Sock said, although it was hard to hear him over all the honking and confused yelling. "Clearly even without a moral compass, your heart is still pure and capable of infinite beauty."

In the parking lot, confused customers attempted to navigate the gridlocked network of loose shopping carts, herding them hesitantly with the noses of their SUVs and mini-vans. A few people were outside ineffectually trying to rein them in, but mostly they just seemed to be making it worse. A particularly insistent soccer mom finally pushed her way out of the exit, plowing four or five shopping carts in front of her. They rolled across the street and into a ditch.

"That's it!" cackled Sam. "Rise up! Rise up against your human oppressors, my soulless brethren!"

"The revolution is upon us!" shouted Sock.

Ben sank lower in the backseat and covered his face with both hands.

--

"This," groaned Sock, "is the least sexy thing ever."

"Like I said," Sam replied. "Married to God. And I'm pretty sure God's gay? So they're more like a harem of beards. Not a lot of motivation to maintain yourself, I guess. Also living a life of purity doesn't exactly reel in the young crowd, case in point."

"Sam, this is me speaking preemptively for your missing soul," Ben said. "Whatever we do, we absolutely cannot allow these women to get hurt in the process. They're _Dominican Sisters_, you seriously don't find anyone more devoted to helping people than that."

"They don't look Dominican to me," Sock said, squinting at the Sisters through the windshield.

"Not that kind of Dominican, Sock," Ben replied. "Are we sure this is where he's hiding? Normally the profile isn't that specific."

"I'm pretty sure," said Sam. "Escaped souls normally aren't smart enough to wander too far from home, and this was his last place of residence before he got…" he checked the file. "Yeesh. Before a contingent of _actual_ exorcists from Rome abducted him off the street and crucified him upside down."

"Eeuhaahg," said Sock.

"There's pictures," Sam said helpfully.

Sock looked queasy. "Naw, I'm good. I want to go get burritos after we're done here, and, uhhh…"

"I actually kind of want steak right now," Sam said, still peering intently at the photographs. Ben made an unhappy noise and changed the subject.

"And you don't think the Sisters would think it was weird that some mysterious priest disappeared abruptly and then came back, with no explanation as to where he'd been?"

"There are plenty of explanations for where he's been," Sam said easily. "None of them would be true, but these women devote their lives to the unquestioning worship of someone they've never even met. Pulling one over on them is going to be cake."

"You're not going to 'pull one over on them,' Sam," said Ben. "Because if you still had a soul, you'd know that was wrong."

"Oh, and how do you propose I remove the threat of some crazy murderous imposter from their midst, if I can't even lie to them?" Sam asked sharply. "_Excuse me, girls, I just have to eradicate your friend off the face of the Earth, mission from Hell, I'm sure you know all about that_." He scoffed. "Then there's crying and screaming, and word gets back to the Vatican, and then suddenly _I'm _being pulled off the street and nailed to a cross. No thanks."

"They wouldn't try to exorcise you," Sock said, "you're not evil."

Sam thought about that.

"You're _not_," Ben insisted forcefully. "An escaped soul is one that's totally corrupted. Your soul is uncorrupted, it's just _you_ who's… kind of wandering around without it, acting like a jerk."

"I'm sorry, those last two sentences were so incredibly boring that already I don't even remember what you said. Are you guys going to infiltrate this church with me or what?"

"I dunno," Sock said, "These are scary Catholic School nuns. I think I just saw one of them try to hit that kid with a ruler. I don't wanna get hit with a ruler, Sam, it would hurt my feelings. And also just hurt."

"We're not letting Sam into the school right now anyway," said Ben. "No offense, Sam, I just don't think you should be around children right now."

"Mmmyeah," said Sam indifferently. "I don't think he spent much time in the school, anyway. He was just there so the Sisters would have someone to confess their sins to, since if you have a uterus you can't stand in for Jesus, and Jesus is the one who's in charge of that stuff." He shook his head. "If he's here, he's most likely hiding in the church."

"Can he even go _in_ the church, now that he's an escaped soul from Hell?" Ben said doubtfully.

"Can _you_ even go in the Church, since you _have_ no soul and you work for Hell?" Sock said. "Without, like, melting or catching fire, or turning into a bat and flying away?"

"I promise that if I turn into a bat," Sam said, "I won't fly away. I'll follow you around, and terrify anyone who tries to talk to you." Sam gasped. "Turning into a bat would be awesome. I hope I _do_ turn into a bat."

"I don't think that actually happens. Probably you just are scorched by God's fury," Ben informed him.

"God is a moron with bad taste in architecture," Sam said as he opened his door. "I guess we're going to find out what happens, because I'm going in."

"At least promise me you two won't blaspheme in front of nuns while we're here," said Ben.

"I am not promising anything except that I'm not going to get kicked out of this place on purpose," Sam said.

"That's good enough," Ben sighed.

"Because I want a chance to give one of those big naked Jesus statues the finger now that I've finally stopped feeling guilty about how lousy his dad treated him," Sam finished. "What a sanctimonious piece of shit."

"_Shhhh_," Ben said, trying to steer Sam away from a large group of elderly nuns.

The Sisters' church itself was a pretty impressive affair, all stained-glass windows and detailed stone carvings of saints bleeding piously. Sam had never particularly had an opinion about churches before, but now for some reason that mysterious itch under his skin was back. He scratched his arm compulsively as they entered through the arched doors, but didn't catch fire or break out into boils. Not where he could see, anyway, he guessed.

"Remember," Ben muttered from behind his right shoulder, "we're just here on reconnaissance. We see if we can spot the soul, then we get out. We'll go home and figure out how to lure him somewhere safe for the capture."

"These seats look super uncomfortable," Sock noticed, hovering on Sam's left. "I am so glad my mom was a big hippie, because my ass would not be this round and luscious after a childhood spent here."

"Oh my god," Sam whispered, perking up. "The only way to lure this soul out into the open is for one of us to pretend to be possessed, and ask him to perform an exorcism. This is going to be the best thing ever. I would make a kickass demonic possession case."

"Do demons actually possess people?" Ben asked. "They seem kind of busy doing their own thing."

"He doesn't want actual cases of possession, Ben," Sam said as they reached the end of the pews. "He knows they actually exist now, and a real demon would probably report his ass. He just needs a really obviously bogus opportunity to torture someone to death. And you know what _that_ means." Sam added excitedly. "I finally have a practical use for learning how to throw up on command."

"That was the best field trip ever," Sock agreed.

"Can I help you gentlemen?" a woman asked. Sam turned around. It was a tiny nun, old and frail looking. Sam felt an inexplicable urge to wring her neck, but ignored it because that would be really, really hard to explain.

"Yeah, hi," he said, brushing imaginary hair out of his eyes. She smiled sweetly and he stepped forward and took her tiny hands in his. "We're looking for someone who helped me a long time ago, whose help I think I might need again."

"Wait but on the Lord, and he shall strengthen your heart, my dear," she said, smiling serenely. Sam wondered if they lobotomized people before accepting them into this kind of thing.

"Someone a little closer to home than the Lord, actually," Sam said, still smiling. "We're looking for a Father Earnest Tallman?" She chuckled. Jackpot.

"No one is closer to your heart than the Lord, but Father Earnest would make a pretty good second-best. You're in luck," she said, "he just returned from sabbatical this morning."

"That's great," Sam said, the itch coming back full force and making him fantasize about turning over the table full of candles in front of the altar. "Do you know how I can get in touch with him?"

"He should be here now," she said, peering behind Sam to the other side of the church. "He'll be taking confession from five to seven this evening; we had one of the younger priests stand in while he was gone, but I know we're _all_ relieved he's back."

"_Really_," Sam said. It was just five o'clock now.

"Sam," said Ben nervously, "we should go."

"I think," Sam said slowly, "that I would really find comfort in confessing my sins right now."

Ben was too busy choking a little bit to disagree.

"Would it be alright if I…?" Sam began, gesturing to the tiny booth hidden in the shadowy recesses of the church's far right.

"Oh my," the Sister said. "I'm sure it would be. I know it always makes me feel better."

Sam held the rosary Perdition had sent as this Soul's vessel in his hand and idly stroked the tiny crucifix with his thumb. "I think I'm feeling better already," he smiled.

Sock was making vague distressed-sounding noises and Ben sounded like he was trying to object as gently as possible, but Sam's focus was already zeroing in on the kill and everything else sounded like it was coming through water, so he happily ignored it and slipped into the confessional.

"Father Earnest?" Sam asked.

The fake priest's head jerked a little bit behind the screen. He'd probably been expecting a little old lady. Sam tried not to smile too widely, because it looked like the wussy "screen" between them didn't actually hide much, and Sam didn't want to spoil the surprise.

"Yes, my son," the faux-Father said hesitantly.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," Sam said, reciting what he could remember from television, but the words tasted unexpectedly strange on his tongue. He realized he couldn't actually distinguish what had been a sin over the past two days and what wasn't. The word didn't sound real.

"How long has it been since your last confession?" Earnest prompted.

"A while," Sam said. He'd been in a church maybe, like, twice before, but the Soul still wasn't looking at him and Sam was afraid the jig would be up once he did. He wondered what the difference between the two of them was, really. "How long since _your_ last confession?" he asked.

Sam could see the Soul's eyes shifting warily, or maybe just uncomfortably. "I have just come back from a three-month Sabbatical with God, clearing my conscience. So I guess you could say that was a very long confession."

"I bet," Sam agreed, putting his fingers on the screen's edge. It moved to the side easily. The Soul finally looked at him. "Did you confess your sins to the Demons in charge of your Eternal Punishment, Earnest?" Sam asked, and yanked the Soul's head through the window by his collar.

"_Holy Mary Mother of God_!" the Soul shouted. Even without his soul, Sam still instinctively knew how to use the vessel once the time was at hand, and, he guessed, that was the only thing the Devil really would need of him. Sam began strangling the Soul with the Rosary.

"Pray for us sinners!" the Soul gasped.

"Shut up," Sam snarled.

"Now and--," the Rosary was beginning to glow, the Soul's skin where it made contact seeming to sink into it, "—at the time of--," and the soul was choking too hard to get the words out, "—at the time of our death!"

And then he was gone, no one in the Confessional except Sam and his vessel, the crucifix hot to the touch now and swinging back and forth like a pendulum in Sam's grasp.

The door of the Confessional slammed open. Someone opened the priest's door as well. Sam realized suddenly that the Soul had probably made an awful lot of noise on the way out for something that was supposed to be all quiet and respectful. There were a lot more nuns now than there were before.

"_Where has Father Earnest gone_?" one of them cried.

"Uh," Sam said, and then, "OH MY GOD." He grabbed the Sister standing in front of him by the shoulders. "He ascended in a beam of golden light! IT'S THE FREAKIN' RAPTURE!"

They stared at him.

"_Wait_," Sam said, pausing as if confused, and then stared at them all, aghast, hands on his head. "If it's the Rapture, _why are you all still here_?!"

Pandemonium broke out.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3, **_**Sam Kills the Video Star**_

The DMV opened at 8:30 in the morning, a half an hour before Ben and Sock had to be back at work. It had been open until six the day before, and Sam had been pretty sure they would have been able to make it, but Ben was too upset to be rational and had furiously insisted that they just go home before Sam did something else horrible.

"I just collected a soul," Sam had said indignantly, "how is that horrible?"

Then Ben had tried to explain something long and boring about mass hysteria and cruelty and blah, blah, blah. Sam had tuned him out and thought about how awesome it would be to have his own cult, except by the time they'd gotten back to the apartment he'd decided that it would actually be kind of annoying to have people whining at you all the time. That was probably why cult leaders were always kool-aiding their followers; kvetching minions were the _worst_.

Sock had seemed perplexed by Sam's intent Kool-Aid fixation when they got home, but by the time they'd found it behind the emergency Otter Pops in the freezer, Ben had already locked himself in his room to sulk or pray or something, and Sam had also realized that he had no idea if they even had anything that could kill people in the apartment, and not just make them puke and shit everywhere, and Sam didn't want to clean that up. They made Kool-Aid anyway and took it to the roof, which seemed to finally get Sock to relax for some reason, even though Sam couldn't stop thinking about what it would look like if he pushed Sock over the edge. That Sock had added two fingers of cheap vodka to the Kool-Aid made it easier to stop thinking in entire, complete thoughts, though, and by the time Sock decided to go back inside Sam was pleasantly buzzed and not interested in doing anything but humming again and watching the stars come out.

He liked his friends, he just couldn't remember why liking them and not killing them were supposed to go hand in hand.

But he was feeling less agitated that morning, and Ben seemed to have calmed down a little bit, which was making things easier.

"I'm sorry I was lecturing you like that last night," Ben said as they pulled into the DMV parking lot. "I know you can't help it, and I hate feeling like the bad guy in this situation."

"You're not a bad guy," Sam said, "I just can't ever remember you being this uptight before."

"Well, to be fair," Sock said, "You've never been this not-uptight before. I think Benji's just picking up the slack in your place."

"Aw, you don't have to do that, Ben," Sam said.

Ben gave him a look that Sam had absolutely no previous experience with, then asked about the Devil again.

"No, I even kind of thought he would show up last night because normally he loves me when I've been drinking, but nothing." Sam frowned. "And I was awake the whole night, so that was a pretty big time-frame for him to pop in— oh, jeez. I hate this place so much."

There was already a line outside the DMV. Didn't these people have lives?

"Sorry, folks," Sam said, walking up to the door. "Somebody should have put a sign up on the front door. This branch of the Washington DMV is closed today for fumigation."

Several people threw up their hands in disgust. None of them seemed even slightly suspicious or thought to ask how Sam knew that, or who Sam even was, although they did feel like complaining to him. "Fumigated for _what_?" someone in a tracksuit asked.

"Vietnamese Fighting Locusts," Sam said seriously, hands in his pockets. "They're real pests. Keep showing up in swarms all over the place and trying to sting the employees. One of the people on our janitorial staff is still in the hospital, they think they're going to have to amputate his foot."

_That_ got them moving.

"How do you _do_ that?" Sock asked.

"With the sheer force of my gigantic balls, I think," said Sam.

"Sam doesn't feel guilt anymore, Sock," Ben explained tiredly. "People can sense that he doesn't feel guilty when he's lying to them, so they must instinctively assume he's not lying."

A confused DMV employee came to the front door and unlocked it. "Where did everybody _go_?" he asked.

"They're giving away free underwear at the Victoria's Secret up the road," Sam said as he walked past. "With the models still in them."

The DMV employee didn't follow them back inside.

"Hi, Gladys!" Sam called across the empty room. The other employees looked at Sam oddly, then went back to their ceaseless scribbling. Sam didn't think they were actually doing anything, they just had forgotten how to not be busy somewhere along the line.

"Place the vessel on the mat," she said tiredly. Sam slipped Earnest's rosary off of his neck. She eyed it suspiciously.

"That's pretty fresh. You caught that one quick." She looked at him like this might be a bad thing.

"He convinced a convent full of nuns that the Rapture was here," Sock said, still sounding like he wasn't really sure what that actually meant.

"The Devil put my soul in a jam jar," Sam explained as Gladys sucked the vessel away. She looked at him in alarm. Ben pounced, sensing an ally.

"That's weird, right? He's been acting nuts ever since,"

"Not _nuts_," Sam said, "Just less not-nuts."

"Nuts," Sock chimed in, "Not that that's a bad thing, Sam."

"I thought you looked too happy," Gladys said soberly. "I guess if it gets results, that's all the Boss really cares about."

"But isn't there some way he can get it back? I mean, it's dangerous for him to be walking around like this."

Gladys looked at them with something akin to pity. "Did you boys know that of all the employees of Hell, Reapers get the least on-the-job safety training? Even people doing my job get a bi-centennial conference on worker's rights."

Sam shrugged. "I don't think it would do me any good anyway."

"He's at the bottom of the totem pole, hun," Gladys said to Ben. "Nobody cares if he gets hurt."

"I don't mean dangerous for_ him_," Ben said, "I meant _other people_."

"You have so little faith in me," Sam complained. "C'mon, I think I'm actually gonna go to work today. Bye, Gladys."

"Bye, kid," she said drearily.

"What are you gonna do at work?" Sock said, obviously still stinging a little bit over that. "Make-out with Ted?"

"I hope it doesn't come to that," Sam said with serious concern, "I didn't notice until the other day but his breath smells really weird, like something awful covered by something not awful, and the thin film of not-awful makes the awful even worse? It's pretty bad."

"TMI, little buddy," Sock said.

"Anyway, I can't decide if I want to get rid of him or keep him in place now that he's under my thumb," Sam said thoughtfully, "He's repulsive, but it would be a lot of work to break someone new in." Sam paused. "But that could also be kind of fun."

"Can we please keep the breaking of other people to a minimum, Sam?" Ben said. "I'm doing okay ignoring how horribly you're messing with Ted because he maybe almost deserves it--"

Sam high-fived him.

"—but whoever they replaced him with probably wouldn't."

"There can't be many Teds in the world," Sock agreed, "I think the government bred him in a test-tube as part of some sort of cold war experiment. _Oh, no_. So maybe it's like in The X-Files, where there are dozens of him across the country, strategically placed in the most useless jobs ever, still waiting for the Russians to attack, and if one dies another one gets sent to—whup!" Sock fell over a foot away from the passenger-side door of the Prius. "—replace him," he finished from the ground. "What the fuck?"

Sam came around the other side of the car to look at him. "Huh, I guess I'm not going to work after all."

"Why not?" Ben said, sounding unduly worried.

"I've got a job to do," Sam said in satisfaction. He knelt over the vessel as Sock rubbed the side of his face and sat up.

"Pretty fast turn-over rate," Sock said. "Do you ever wonder why so many souls escape in Seattle? Are we some sort of nexus of Evil and we've just been too busy being a city full of hippies to care?"

--

Sam hadn't been to an actual library in years, so he was caught off-guard when he arrived at the Seattle Central branch and discovered that it wouldn't be open for another forty-five minutes.

"What the hell," Sam said, "who would have guessed librarians like to sleep in late?" He leaned full-body against the glass and peered inside, his hands clawing helplessly. "I am dying," he moaned. "Forty-five minutes? Are you kidding?" he asked the door. "I could get hit by a car or _stabbed_ or something, or _hit_ someone with a car or stab them." He stopped to think about this. He could stab someone and then also hit them with a car, which might take up the whole forty-four minutes he had left to wait.

That was when he noticed something.

He had no reflection.

The entire library was made out of glass and steel; the walls were huge reflective surfaces. In front of him Sam could clearly see the buildings and trees behind him, but it was like looking at a picture of something from somewhere else, because he _wasn't there_.

He placed his palm up against the door. The pads of his fingers smudged it slightly, but in the place where his palm should have shown up, all he could see was the windows of the office building across the street, and the cars and trucks passing by.

For the first time in two days, Sam was cognizant of feeling incomplete, in a cold, distant corner of his brain. And a little dizzy. He realized he hadn't eaten anything before they left the condo, and Sock was always saying Sam got extra grumpy when his blood sugar was down. There was a Seattle's Best just up the block, he could go and get a coffee and whatever and then he'd be back to normal.

Or what was normal for him _now_.

Instead he turned abruptly toward the entrance to the underground parking, where he could see lights on and what looked like the silhouette of a person in a booth. He had to do something; the idea of sitting in a coffee shop for a half an hour was enough to make him scream, make him feel like he was about to be crushed again even though he was outside. Some strange hollowness left in him where The Devil's hand had been was fluttering badly, like the empty void of a moth trapped between a screen and a window pane. Sam felt like bringing the entire library, its huge improbable glass shape, crashing to the ground.

But it would be really, really hard to find what he was looking for after that, so he didn't. Maybe once he was done.

"Hi," he said to the parking attendant in the booth, "are there any unlocked, unguarded entrances to the library from inside of this parking garage?"

"Why do you want to know?" the other man said, sounding only curious and completely unthreatened.

"Did you know that Seattle Central Library has had fourteen bomb threats in the past week?" Sam intoned. "Someone dearly wants to destroy Seattle's largest depository for information, and guess where they think that is?" Sam raised an eyebrow and jabbed his finger at the ground. "Of course the actual largest depository of information in Seattle is on over three billion floppy disks left-over from the 1990's, hidden twenty miles below the surface of the earth, but obviously that's top secret so they're not going to think to bomb _that_."

"Who would want to bomb Seattle?" the attendant asked, not as if he was questioning Sam but as if he was questioning the rightness of the world at large.

"That's classified," Sam said grimly.

"I always leave the stairwell door at the back of the lot unlocked for the librarians," the attendant confessed guiltily. "I know that sounds lazy, but it just seemed easier that way. I can go lock it now."

"No, no," Sam said quickly. "That's what I'm here for," he added, gesturing at his backpack. "I need to install this government-approved security lock and microscopic monitoring system before the library opens." He gave a little salute as he walked away from the attendant's booth. "Keep up the good work."

"I will, sir! I'm a patriot!" the attendant called after him.

Sam wondered what that had to do with being a parking attendant.

Inside the actual library, Sam began to wish that he'd come here before just so he'd know where he was going. His awesome lying powers were truly something to behold but librarians were scary and he had a feeling it would be tough to find what he was looking for if he had to convince them he was the new janitor, which was the only explanation he could come up with, besides just "someone very enthusiastic about libraries." If it had been a normal library it might have been easier to sneak around, but this one was all open, echo-y spaces and glass walls. It felt like being in an especially fancy airport. Sam decided to ninja his way to his goal.

It took three undignified belly-crawls, one spectacular over-the-railing vault and a lot of unnecessary dropkicking the air to find the children's section of the library. Sam was suddenly glad he was here before the library opened; he didn't want to have to actually be in here while there were children around, screaming and peeing everywhere or whatever.

Sam's problem was this:

"What the hell is _that_?" Sock had asked in the parking lot when Sam opened the vessel's box.

"Oh man, this is kind of a let-down after the rosary," Sam had whined. He took the plush-toy out of its box and pulled the string in its back.

"_You're all soldiers in my troops, ka-pow_!" it said.

Sam pulled the string again.

"_Follow me to enlightenment!_" it said.

Sam pulled the string again.

"_Worship my graven image or suffer my wrath_," it said. The words warbled disturbingly on the third and sixth words.

"… Actually, this is maybe kind of cool," Sam had admitted.

In the car they established that they all definitely sort of vaguely remembered this from their childhoods, somewhere after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and before the first Power Rangers movie, but that they had no idea how it related even remotely to the Escaped Soul, whose profile was distressingly sparse. At the Bench (with Sam hiding under an empty cardboard box in case Ted came by), they had Googled "weird yellow cow sheep thing worship my graven image satan??" and come up with the hideous thing's name—Mooby—and that the show had been cancelled after the CEOs had been murdered when Sam had been, like, twelve, but that was all the way in Cleveland, and the soul's name didn't come up in conjunction with any of it.

The only connection to Seattle they'd been able to come up with was a grainy photograph on a hideous fan-run website of "prototype Mooby," which Sock thought he recognized from when he was a kid.

"But the memories are shrouded in darkness," he'd said, "because, you know, eighties television. Also I think there was lead in the breakfast cereal I ate back then."

Eventually Ben had suggested that the one time he'd gotten the urge to watch He-Man reruns in high school, he'd found them at Seattle Central Library.

"If anybody has held on to horrible VHS tapes of children's entertainment based on toy lines, it's Seattle Central," he'd assured Sam. "Please don't traumatize any children while you're there."

"Children love trauma," Sam had said. "It builds character and gives them things to talk about when they hit high school."

So here Sam was, not traumatizing any children. The children's section was clean and hyper-aesthetic looking, so Sam was starting to suspect he wasn't going to find anything on VHS, much less anything related to obscure 90's television programming about devil-cows.

Some of the decorations in this joint were pretty horrifying. Sam paused to add the word "porn" to a poster insisting that everybody loved to read.

It wasn't until he reached the back of the room—in retrospect, he probably should have started there—that he found something promising. "_Blast from the past_!!" said a sign made with Microsoft WordArt, over a shelf of slightly sticky-looking VHS boxes. Sam bent over and began tipping boxes to look at their covers, scanning for the words "Mooby" and pictures that looked familiar. He felt somewhat offended that Transformers counted as a blast from the past. Cosby Show, Gumby, Captain Planet, Punky Brewster…

His phone rang. He nearly knocked the entire shelf over before he managed to silence it.

Flat on his stomach, Sam put his cell up to his ear and peered through the bottom of the stacks to watch for anyone coming. "Hello?" he whispered.

"_Sam_?"

_Oh, for the love of fancy bedazzled Jesus_, Sam thought. _I should have just killed him while I was at the Bench and been done with it_.

"Ted, are you alright?" Sam asked. "You sound worried."

"_I'm worried about you_," Ted said. "_Where are you right now_?"

"Seattle Union Labor headquarters, I wanted to try and find out who was handling the Work Bench case and talk to them," Sam said.

"_Oh_," Ted squeaked. "_Listen, don't worry about that, okay? I mean, I appreciate your loyalty to me and to the Bench, Sam, but I don't want them to think I'm sending you there to do my dirty work_."

"Do you want me to come into work_?_" Sam said. "I was going to clock-in yesterday but it seemed like that would distract you."

It sure as hell better have distracted Ted, Sam had put a lot of effort into making him nervous. He wasn't sure he could keep this up much longer; he could barely play nice with people he _did_ like. With Ted he had to imagine amusing embarrassing ways of posing Ted's corpse to be found by Work Bench employees when they opened up the next morning. His favorite so far: death by toaster-fucking.

Ted was telling him reassuring platitudes about understanding and comradery, and how much he appreciated Sam's loyalty again, and blah, blah, blah. It was funny in an abstract way but in practice Sam felt like his brain was melting out of his ears. He scrunched his face up against the carpet, then pulled his head back sharply because it smelled disturbingly like apple juice. Then his eyes drifted to the side and he caught sight of what he was looking for, staring him right in the face. If it'd had teeth it would have eaten his brain out the back of his skull.

On a shelf with a hand-written sign that said "LOCAL CLASSICS & STAFF FAVORITES," there were three VHS boxes in a row. They were blanks that someone had recorded something on, with handmade boxes, the grainy photo Sam had seen on the Internet scotch-taped to the front.

"_Nancy Goidruff King County Regional Education, 1989-91, feat. Paulie Corin, et al_."

Sam didn't know what the heck kind of librarian wrote "et al" in a kid's section, but Paulie Corin was the Escaped Soul.

"Ted," Sam said into the phone, interrupting what he was sure was a really heartfelt something or other, "We can't pretend to each other anymore. I don't want to dance around this anymore."

Ted was spluttering into the phone, but Sam was too busy trying to pick up all three tapes with one hand to care. "I'm coming to the Work Bench, Ted, and we're going to talk," he said shortly. "I'd tell you to make sure you're there, but you're never not there so I'll see you soon."

He hit End and turned around to leave, then stopped short.

"Are you a stalker?" Tammy asked, staring at him suspiciously. "Because we're supposed to report people like you to a trusted adult. We didn't tell anyone it was you who dealt us that weed, you know, even though they're all freaking out about it."

"Jesus, aren't you kids ever in school?" Sam asked. "What the fuck do we pay taxes for if all you guys are doing is going on field trips?"

"This is an _educational_ field trip, which is why we're still allowed to go," Abortion Kid explained. "We're learning about the Doing Decimals System."

"That is super awesome," Sam said. "I'm glad they have a system for that. Where's your adult?"

"Who on earth are _you_?" asked the woman Sam suspected was their adult.

"The library fairy," Sam said, "I take old, used-up library materials and leave you a shiny quarter." He paused. "Buuuut I seem to have run out of quarters, so I'm going to leave you guys arcade tokens instead, alright?"

"How did you get up here so fast?" the woman asked, looking honestly disturbed. "We just opened the doors."

Hm. Either he'd finally found a lie that was just too ridiculous, or this woman was somehow immune to him. She was probably a librarian, with library-granted superpowers, although she was kind of too young and pretty for Sam to understand why she'd be a librarian.

"I came in with these guys," Sam said, gesturing to his stoners-in-training. "Right, guys?"

"Only if you give us arcade tokens," one of them said.

"What?" the librarian said, apparently intending to run the full question-word gamut.

"Arcade tokens for everyone!" Sam said. "Like I said."

"He did come in with us," Tammy confirmed easily. "He's our student teacher. Sometimes people can't tell he isn't one of us, because he's so short and his beard is so wimpy."

"I'm not trying to grow a beard, you little snot," Sam said, "I just haven't had a chance to shave. Not all of us can grow a full, thick mustache overnight like _your mom_."

Super Librarian was staring at him. He shot her a conspiratorial half-smile and patted Timmy on the head. "I was just showing these kids the stuff I used to watch on TV when _I_ was their age," Sam said. "Eons ago, in a galaxy far, far away." He waved his stack of VHS tapes at her. Her whole demeanor changed.

"You remember Moochie?" she asked, delighted.

"Some of my fondest memories are of Moochie," Sam said. "Way better than that Mooby stuff."

"I'll say," she said, "After the rights were purchased the whole thing went down hill. It was so much better as a local production. I was a regular on the show," she explained.

"_Really_," Sam said. "Wow, we're in the presence of a celebrity. I had no idea."

"What are you even talking about?" asked Tammy impatiently, tossing her hair.

"Boring old people stuff," Sam said. "What are you guys doing in the kids section anyway, I thought you were adults?"

"We _are_," Abortion said. "We're just _looking_."

"Hey, look," Sam said, pointing at a table back towards the front of the room, "Japanese comics based on trading card games." They swarmed like piranhas to a corpse. Sam almost liked them better for it.

Super Librarian made a face. "I like that manga gets kids to read, but I keep worrying someday I'm going to get a group that doesn't remember how to read left-to-right."

"That's fascinating," Sam assured her. "What do you remember about Paulie Corin, aside from that he was a man who let people credit him as _Paulie_?"

She laughed. "Mr. Corin was Moochie, of course. He wore the suit."

"Of course," Sam nodded. "Where was this filmed, anyway? I always wondered as a kid."

"Oh, at an old TV station out in Auburn," she said, "The place got torn down and turned into a multi-level Dunkin' Donuts years ago. They're filming the new show right near here, though," she said, "in the studio on Mission."

Sam blinked. "New show?"

"Yeah," she said, watching Tammy beat one of her classmates upside the head to establish dominance. "Isn't that why you were looking at the old Moochie tapes? I was just thinking about them yesterday, when I heard from Mr. Corin."

"… Oh, you still keep in touch?" Sam asked politely. Abortion was examining the sign he'd defaced earlier intently.

"Not really, no," she said. "After the show was picked up he disappeared, I remember my mom being pretty upset about something but I can't remember what it was." She frowned, then perked up immediately. "But he came to visit me here yesterday, right out of the blue. He's doing the puppeteering for a new local kid's show, they just started production."

"_Really_," Sam said again. "Well, that's great news. That's really, really great news." He nodded seriously. "I guess I'm gonna go check these out then," he said, gesturing with the tapes.

"What… about your students?" she asked.

"It's part of a new public school initiative to teach independence," Sam explained, pulling arcade tokens out of his pockets and dumping them on the table next to Tammy. "We abandon our students in random locations and then they have to find their own way back."

"Why?" she said, apparently back to her list of question-words.

"Why not?" Sam called back as he left.

On the way back to the Work Bench, Sam called the cops.

--

"How did you do this," Sock demanded as soon as Sam showed up. "What magical powers have you been granted by Satan?"

"Nothing you don't know about. Was that Ted?" Sam asked, gesturing with his head at the cop car driving off.

Andi came over and hugged him. "I am so happy," she said, "that I have forgiven you for leaving me alone to corral all those stupid shopping carts yesterday. This is what you were talking about, isn't it?" She punched him in the arm. "You had dirt on him, and you didn't share!"

"I didn't want to spoil the surprise," Sam said. "And giving it to kids, right? Who knew?"

Ben raised both eyebrows and gave Sam a look that might have been dangerous if it wasn't coming from Ben. "Kids? What about kids, Sam?"

"Did you think they'd actually come down on him so hard just for having a little weed in his office?" Sam scoffed. "Nobody cares. But apparently there was a big fuss the other day. Eleven-year-olds blitzed out of their little minds in a park somewhere." Sam tutted for effect.

"Well," Andi said, "I'm determined not to feel bad about this."

"Yeah," Sock said, "Embrace the schadenfreude."

"I guess he'll probably be back home in a few hours, anyway," Ben said.

"Wherever Ted's home _is_," Sock said wonderingly. "A nice cozy morgue drawer or toxic waste dump site somewhere."

"There's no way he's coming back to work after this," Andi said, and did a little dance in a circle. "Once the higher-ups hear about this, his ass is toast." She sighed dreamily. "I'm going to go hide all of his possessions so he has a harder time finding them once he comes back to collect them."

"I don't feel real emotions about other people anymore," Sam said once she'd left, "But I think I still love her a little bit."

"How'd you plant the weed in his office? The only way they would have been able to arrest him for that is if it'd been someplace only he could get to."

"Diversionary tactics," Sam said.

"Say no more," said Sock. "_Please_."

"They're not gonna be able to follow this back to you, are they?" Ben said.

"No, come see something," Sam said, leading them back into the store to the security booth. The other Bench employees seemed to be too busy celebrating to notice anything else. "Sock," Sam said, "Go inside the booth and check the camera for where Ben and I are standing."

"Is this gonna be some kind of crazy Mission Impossible shit?" Sock asked, walking into the booth. "I mean, _I_ know you're not as stupid as you look, but you're still not—hey, are you gonna stand in one place or what?"

"I am standing in one place," said Sam.

"We're both waving at the camera," Ben said. "Well, I'm waving, Sam's giving it the finger."

Sock's head popped back around the side of the door, then popped back inside, then out again.

"_Sam, you're invisible_."

"I know, isn't it great?" Sam said gleefully. "Even if Ted figures out what I did, when they check the security camera he has in his office, all they're going to see is him talking to himself!"

Ben had just gone in the booth to check this for himself. He came back out. He looked worried again. "Any sign of The Devil yet?"

"Nah," Sam said. "Besides, we don't need his help on this one, I totally found everything we're going to need to nab this Soul." He lifted up his VHS tapes. "C'mon, I didn't actually need these, but I want to see this guy in action. And if Sock has any horrible flashbacks when he sees it."

"Thanks, Sam," said Sock.

The tapes were excruciating. Sam couldn't tell if they made him feel more or less like humanity deserved to be destroyed. On the one hand, he wasn't bored. But that was possibly because he no longer had enough brain cells to _feel_ boredom.

"Oh man" said Sock, his face slack, "All of my extremities are numb, like I'm being cryogenically frozen from the outside in."

On the break-room television, a man dressed as an oversized yellow cow was teaching some kids with sideways pony tails and reversible shorts about the alphabet, but some of the words he was using were totally bizarre. _Y is for Yelling, Yummy and Yahweh_? Sam thought. _This guy does deserve to go to hell. _He opened the portfolio and looked at what little information there was again.

"Oh, this guy is way too into Hug Your Neighbor Time," Sock said.

"I dunno, that's not what he went to Hell for," Sam said absently, "Maybe he just really likes hugs."

"What'd he do?" Ben asked.

"Killed four people," Sam said. He compared the neat librarian writing on the back of one of the boxes to the names in the profile. "The show's writers."

"This show _had_ writers?" Sock said disbelievingly.

"Apparently," Sam nodded. "Which explains why he killed them."

Moochie had moved on to explaining something about friendship and teamwork. It involved dancing.

Ben looked over the back of another box. "It looks like the writers and the producers were the same people," he said. "Yeah, the show's creator was one of 'em, Nancy. Maybe he killed them after they sold the rights to the show?"

"Wow," Sock said, "Condemning yourself to Hell over a Barney clone. That's _sad_."

"People have done it for less, I think," Sam said. "It's just we don't deal with them, because they're not smart enough to escape from Hell."

"Oh, I can't begin to imagine what it would be like if it were _easy_ to escape from Hell," Ben said, rolling his eyes. "We might be stuck capturing a soul every day or something. _Oh wait_."

--

Sam had wanted to walk in the front lobby, but Ben made them drive around to the back and find the loading dock. "You like lying too much," he said.

"You're right, Ben," Sam muttered as they waited for a crew member smoking a cigarette to leave. "I shouldn't neglect my other favorite hobbies: breaking and entering, and trespassing." He didn't mention that he'd sort of already done that today.

"I've always wanted to see a TV studio," Sock said. "Before we leave, can we steal props?"

"Sock, stop encouraging him," Ben said.

"Why do I have to be less myself just because Sam is more like me than I am now?" Sock whined.

"For the same reason I have to be an uptight jerk now," Ben whispered sharply. The crew member cocked his head as someone said something over his headset, then went back inside.

"You guys are adorable," Sam said as he darted out from behind the dumpster they'd been hiding behind and caught the door before it shut. "Now move your asses before I decide to just start leaving you behind from now on."

The inside of the studio was almost entirely dark, except for the dim glow of emergency exit lights and a few bare bulbs C-clamped in odd places. Everything smelled like sawdust and coffee. To the right, Sam could hear voices barking instructions and the low hum of people and electronic equipment. A yellowed piece of paper push-pinned to the wall on the left read "DRESS ROOMS + PROPS DEP'T," with an arrow. At some point someone had written "_and the entrance to freaking Narnia_" underneath.

"Props!" Sock said giddily, and followed the sign.

Sam let Sock paw through the storage room stacked dangerously high with mannequins and huge novelty items, and pushed farther down the claustrophobically small, stuffy hallway. Each door seemed to be approximately two inches from the last, and everything seemed to be held together with packing tape and push-pins. Sam stopped; one of the doors had a yellow construction paper star taped to it. The star said "Paulie!"

"Guys," Sam whispered back down the hall, where Sock was trying to stuff an old dial phone into his pants and Ben was trying to get him not to. Sam jerked his head impatiently.

Moochie's dressing room was smaller than Sam's closet at home, or maybe it just seemed smaller because the props department had apparently been using it as overflow space. A disembodied head with a rainbow wig toppled over and fell on Sam. He sneezed.

Ben squeezed in behind him. There was a slatted wooden accordion door next to a collapsed folding chair, because apparently Paulie's closet still warranted a closet of its own. Inside there was a pile of old shoes and a bunch of empty hangers.

"They must be shooting right now," Ben said, "Otherwise Paulie's costume would be here. I guess we've got time to look around. We need to find something that will tell us where he's staying when he's not here."

"Or else he lives here, like an insane giant cow version of the Phantom of the Opera," Sock said. "Singing haunting renditions of Old MacDonald to himself, obsessively monitoring all of the other shows shot here…"

"Collecting hair from the other actors to turn into effigies he can have tea-parties with," Sam added as he rifled through the pieces of paper on Paulie's desk. Ben shuddered.

Suddenly they could actually hear one of the barking voices that had been in the background, coming from much closer than before. "_Okay, guys, ten minutes 'til we start shooting, let's go_!" Sock knocked over the clown wig again. Then, the low thrum of a lot of people coming a lot closer. Ben yanked Sam into the closet, clambering over the piles of shoes. Sock jumped in after them, sliding the accordion door shut as quickly as possible. Sam grimaced. "Sock, this is much closer than I ever, ever wanted to be to your--" Ben clamped the one hand not totally pinned to the side of the closet over Sam's mouth. Someone came in the room.

Through the wooden slats, Sam recognized Paulie from the photograph in the profile and the grainy snapshot from the Internet. He was a pretty weird looking guy, but Sam guessed it didn't matter what you looked like when you wore a giant cow costume for a living.

Or an unliving.

But then Paulie shut the door, and it became clear why his costume wasn't in his dressing room. His skin began to ripple and bloat, his thinning hair disappearing entirely. His body began to bulge. Then he turned bright yellow. Sock made a muffled noise somewhere between a gag and a whimper.

Paulie _was_ Moochie. Just as other Escaped Souls before him had come to embody things they had loved most in their first lives, Paulie had become the character he had killed four people over.

… That was really, really, _really_ pathetic. Sam's fingers itched to just take this lame, worthless Soul back to Hell, but the vessel was in his bag and with Ben and Sock squished up against him he couldn't move his arms _period_, much less reach around and retrieve it. Sam gritted his teeth, feeling his blood heat up and the itch return, frustrated at not being able to get to the freakin' action already. Next time he was totally leaving Ben and Sock behind.

Fortunately Moochie didn't need any gross old shoes today—his feet were shaped like large hooves now anyway—and he left the room, calling something friendly out to someone. His voice sounded exactly like it had on the VHS tapes. Sam wondered if it was actually possible to rip someone's vocal chords out.

"Auhhghg," Sock said. "Gahhaha. I am going to have nightmares about things from my childhood for the first time since Mr. Rogers died."

"Ditto," Ben said.

"Sock, you are taking up half of the space I should be in, in this closet," Sam said. "_Move your fat ass_."

"At least I _have_ an ass," Sock said, opening the accordion door again and promptly falling out. Sam climbed out over him and peered through the half-shut door.

"Well, _now_ he won't be back for a while," Ben said. "So we can keep looking. At the very least, I think I see a few receipts here… we can try looking at all of them and figuring out where he goes a lot, then capture him there."

"I have been bored for too much of today to even consider that," Sam said. The last of the talent—a little girl with pigtails and braces—had just cleared out. Sam left the room and followed her, tuning out Ben's angry hissing.

In the direction they hadn't gone the quantity of small blinking lights rose significantly. In the room that seemed to hold the bulk of them were most of the adults, watching dozens of small monitors, all of a brightly-lit set, where Sam could see Moochie just arriving with several children in tow. A few more adults appeared on screen, all of them with headphones on, clipping microphones discretely to the children and adjusting things just off-camera.

"So it turns out there aren't a lot of letters you can put before 'oochie' and not have it sound like you should be on pay-per-view," a disheveled-looking older man with a graying beard explained to another man in a suit. "It took us a while to even get Newchie approved, but they eventually let us have it when I said it sounded Japanese and that'd bring in the viewership." He leaned back in his swivel chair and idly watched the monitor, then cupped his hand around the microphone attached to his headset. "Lauren, tell Becky to untuck her shirt, would you? It doesn't look natural." Someone on-screen made an 'OK' sign at the camera.

"Anyway, we're really lucky to have this guy working with us. I knew him back when he was doing the original show, although I was just a grip then. So relieved when he got in touch with me again, we're really hoping this pilot sparks interest with the bigger networks."

"His costume's very realistic," said the man in the suit.

"Yeah, it looks like we have a big CGI budget or something, isn't it great? It's his, it's Paulie's costume. We wanted to change it, since, you know, copyright and all that, but he wouldn't agree to let us alter the thing. We're pretty sure it's different enough to keep Complex Corp from trying to drain us."

Somebody said something over the headphones. The bearded man looked at a clipboard, then got down to business. "Okay, gang," he said into his microphone. "We're gonna start with our opening theme song, alright? Lauren, does somebody have cue-cards out there for the kids? Good, good."

"Sam, this is so bad," Ben whispered harshly. Sam looked at him over his shoulder.

"I know, who knew being in TV production was this boring?" Sam said.

"That's not what I mean and you know it," Ben said, grabbing his shoulders. "Now c'mon, let's get out of here before you do something really stupid."

Sam shook him off and scuttled past the door of the director's booth. "This is _my_ job, Ben," he said, "Only one person gets to tell me how to do it, and he's avoiding me, so sit on it."

"_Quiet on the set_!" someone said sharply in their direction.

Sam took out the plush-toy and walked around the corner to look at the set. The camera operators were all focused on their viewfinders and didn't notice him. He thought the Soul might—sometimes they seemed to recognize him instinctively—but the lights directed at the set were pretty bright, so Paulie might not have been able to see past the cameras. Sam pulled the string.

"_Venerate me_!" the Mooby toy groaned.

The Soul's head snapped around. "Who said that?" he asked, his Saturday-morning cartoon-friendly voice contrasting with the dangerous edge to the question.

Someone said something over the headset of the cameraman next to Sam, who turned to Sam angrily. "You can't be here," he snapped. "Get off set." Sam ignored him.

"Hey, Paulie," he said, walking closer. "Let's make this easy. Just come with me out back, alright?"

Wrath was definitely Moochie's sin. He picked up a plastic prop chair and threw it at Sam. Sam dodged, then ran forward, pulling the toy's string again.

"_No one loves you as much as I do, not even your god_!" the toy said. Moochie howled in pain and grabbed Sam by the front of his shirt. In his enlarged form he was easily a foot and a half taller. He threw Sam into a prop wall and it crashed over upon impact, knocking over what sounded like a ladder and something made of glass behind it. A clock with big, friendly hands and bright red numbers hit Sam on the head.

Sam growled and reached for the Mooby doll again, but it was on the other side of the room. Moochie ran towards him, his head down, his bull horns looking frighteningly real. Kids were screaming. Sam really wished they wouldn't, it was pretty annoying.

Sam grabbed one of the free-standing lights and swung at Moochie's head with it. The glass of the bulb shattered against his face. Moochie roared and grabbed his end of the light, sweeping it violently from side to side. It snapped in half.

So Sam jammed the sharp end of his half into Moochie's stomach like a sword. It pierced him just like it would anyone else's flesh, the skin dimpling with a sick squishing sound. Then Sam wrenched it back and forth, but physical pain never seemed to bother these Souls very much. He let go and leapt over a toppled art easel and a terrified child to get to the fallen vessel. When he turned around Moochie had already pulled the metal from his stomach, the wound sealing up rapidly even as cow blood dripped from the end of the broken light onto a big diagram about the seasons.

"You're a _terrible role model_!" Sam told the Escaped Soul, and pulled the toy's string one more time. As the string fully extended, Moochie began to glow, tendrils of light connecting the vessel and the Soul.

"_Follow me into damnation_," the toy croaked, and as the string receded back inside, something terrible happened to Moochie. It was like watching him deflate, only it was clear that what was being sucked out by the vessel was meat and guts instead of air. He was screaming in agony and then the scream strangled to a stop, the mouth of his meat-costume caving in grotesquely, Moochie's features collapsing in on themselves and sagging wetly to the ground.

Sam looked at the vessel, warm now with the Escaped Soul inside. That was definitely just as awesome as the priest. Someone was pushing aside the collapsed prop wall from outside the set area.

"Is… is Newchie doing a magic-trick?" asked one of the children, staring at Moochie's hollowed-out remains.

"No, peanut," Sam informed her cheerfully, "Newchie's dead now."

One of the other kids barfed all over himself. Sam grimaced. Gross.

--

This time their soul capture wound up on the news. Apparently the nun thing had only warranted a small column in the local newspaper about grief-induced hysteria, but the death of Newchie had bizarre, graphic footage to go along with it, and that made it an instant star in the eyes of the local news networks.

_Especially_ bizarre because Sam never showed-up on camera; the official theory seemed to be that Paulie Corin had been the victim of some exceptionally rare genetic disorder, and the clip they kept showing over and over again actually a massive seizure. His death was the result of "falling" on a piece of broken equipment, the bacteria causing immediate cardiac arrest and "somehow liquefying his organs, fusing them to his costume, which coroners say is most likely untreated leather."

Sam cackled over his beer, legs propped up on the table in front of their TV. Sock was sitting on the other side of the couch, looking like he wasn't sure if he wanted to be sitting this close to Sam. Ben was a little more definite on his position; he was sitting all the way on the other side of the room, at the kitchen counter, glaring at the back of Sam's head. It was pretty annoying, but at least he wasn't lecturing like yesterday.

Ben muted the television. Sam glanced over his shoulder and gave him a questioning look.

"Sam," Ben said grimly, "I don't think you should go into work tomorrow."

"What?" Sam said. "Work is going to be a breeze for the next couple of weeks. At least until they find a replacement for Ted. We'll just sit around and play lawnmower polo for three days straight. It'll be awesome."

"I think you're a danger to yourself," Ben said, "And others, and I think you need to take a break. Maybe if you stay put The Devil will show up and you can ask for your soul back."

"I seriously doubt he's going to give it back to me. I'm too good at my job this way," Sam said easily.

"Sam, getting on the eight o'clock news doesn't count as doing your job well," Ben said. "It's a miracle we didn't get caught and arrested."

"Well, The Devil apparently thinks I'm doing an _awesome_ job," Sam countered haughtily.

"I thought you hadn't talked to him," Ben replied, narrowing his eyes.

"I haven't," Sam admitted, "But he wouldn't be giving me another vessel this quickly if he didn't like how things were going, huh?" He gestured with his beer at the box that had just appeared on the kitchen counter next to Ben. Ben jerked away.

"That is just _creepy_," Sock said unhappily. "Do you think someone invisible brings it here? Or do they just teleport it straight from Hell? Does _The Devil_ sneak in and leave it here?" He looked abruptly panicked. "_Does The Devil just walk around our apartment invisible all the time and we don't know it_?"

"Could be," Sam said distractedly, examining the box up-close now. He opened it and peered inside, then laughed.

Ben looked at him warily.

"This'll make you happy, Ben," Sam said reassuringly, as he lifted the vessel out of its box. "Looks like I'm going to be seeking professional help sometime in the near future!"

The vessel was a straightjacket.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4,** _**Patients Are a Virtue**_

"Maybe it's for you," Ben said glumly. "Why don't you try it on, see if it fits?"

"Yeah, totally," Sam said, unimpressed. "Your cunning is unsurpassed, but I'm not that stupid." He sipped from his beer. "Orchestrate an elaborate set-up involving Andi and a pair of handcuffs, maybe I'll fall for that."

Sock took out his cell phone. Ben threw a paper towel at him in disgust.

Sam opened the portfolio and peered at the photo. "Hello, Mikey Nelson," he said pleasantly. "I look forward to meeting you, and utterly destroying your hope for a life outside of eternal torturous damnation."

"Sam," said Sock, "If you're gonna keep leaving the condo, we have to have a talk about this whole 'identifying with things that aren't human' thing. Like shopping carts, and pieces of paper."

"The shopping cart is a noble beast," Sam explained, "Doomed to an existence of drudgery it never asked for, only capable of joy when it has the opportunity to develop a squeaky wheel."

"That's a nice metaphor," Sock said, "And here we thought you spent English class drawing the back of Andi's head in your notebook and sighing longingly."

"I miss sad, lovesick puppy Sam," Ben added. "He was frustrating but I wasn't afraid his head was going to spin around and he'd spit up pea soup on me."

"Exactly," Sock said, looking into Sam's eyes. "Sam, you have to at least start to pretend a little bit that you are still a real human being like before, or something crazy and awful is going to happen, and as much as we kind of want to lock you in the closet for your own safety?" Sock grabbed both of Sam's shoulders at this and began shaking him back and forth. "We – don't – actually – want – bad – things – to – happen – to – you – you – fucking – dumbass – vampire!"

Sam stared at him. "I am…" he started slowly, "… like, ninety percent certain that I don't fulfill the chief requirements of vampirism."

Sock made a comically tragedy-struck face. "That there is a ten percent left over there is _bad_, Sam."

"We live in a world of uncertainties," Sam agreed. "Now get your hands off me before I stab a fork in your eye."

"Rule number one," Ben clarified, raising a finger, "Don't threaten violence for no reason."

"Rules don't apply to me anymore," Sam said simply. "And violence is funny, and makes things easier."

"Rule number two," Sock continued, "Stop acting like you think you're better than everyone else."

"I _am_ better than everyone else," Sam said, confused. "Everyone else is gullible and boring."

Ben closed his eyes very tight. Sock paused, shook himself, and then put his hands out in mediation. "Okay, sure," he said, "But like a billion fucking gullible, boring people can still make your life hell, so why not humor them and pretend to go along with everything?"

Sam eyed him, considering. "That could work," he admitted. "No one has to _know_ I'm better than them for me to _be_ better than them."

Ben almost did a little dance still sitting on the counter. Sock put his hands up in the air.

Sam quirked an eyebrow at them. "But that is _boring_, and when I get bored I feel like someone is stabbing me over and over again in the brain."

Ben waved his hands frantically. "No, no, that's okay. That's good. It's probably what little is left of your humanity, so deeply ingrained in your being," he paused for effect, making a _duh_ face while still managing to look relieved beyond words, "that even your amoral conscience is disturbed by your lack of a soul!"

"That's what that is?!" Sam asked, outraged. "Motherfucker, how do I get _rid_ of it?"

--

After a while Ben and Sock had gotten tired of fruitlessly arguing with Sam over whether or not enjoying his freedom was worth a few injured feelings and some traumatized children, and Sam had taken the soul's profile up to the roof. Sock hadn't seemed interested in joining him, which was just as well, since Sam had also needed time to think of ways to get rid of his remaining humanity.

He'd tried yelling at it to fuck off already for a while, aiming his shouting at the spot where The Devil had removed the light of his soul an eternity ago. This did not make anything interesting happen except for one of the neighbors leaning out her window to shout obscenities at him, though. He decided that if he just kept doing things that made Ben lecture him, he could wear away at it until it was gone.

The Escaped Soul turned out to be a lot more interesting than the issue of Sam's, anyway.

Eventually he had fallen asleep up on the roof, flat on his back on the concrete. He had dreamt of fog, and a lighthouse. Lighthouses meant rocky shores, so Sam had avoided its light for all he was worth although the invisible tide kept trying to drag him in its direction. He'd tried to change his dream into something exciting but it hadn't worked-- the only thing that seemed to exist in his mind was the fog and the stupid, stupid light. He had bored himself awake shortly before dawn.

While Ben stumbled around in the kitchen and Sock sang in the shower, Sam Googled the new Soul's name. This time the Internet was a lot more useful.

"So, yeah," Sam said through a mouth full of freezer-waffle-sandwich in the car, "guy kills his mom and dad, gets caught, threatens to kill himself. Pretty bland stuff. He doesn't even die then. And he's, like, sixteen, and apparently they weren't model parents, either, so the courts ship his butt off to West Seattle Psych. Ten years go by, Mikey finally kicks it. Overdose, a doctor's error." Sam paused to concentrate on running a red light. A little old lady honked furiously and Sam felt a happy swell in his heart. Today was going to be a good day.

"The profile doesn't say anything about what happened after he died, though," Ben said, flipping through it.

"Well, he went to Hell, obviously," Sam said. "And after that, they don't know what happened to him because they are apparently incompetent down there, and cannot hold onto a guy who couldn't even manage to escape from a mediocre psych hospital for ten years." He rolled his eyes, and then took a moment to enjoy flipping someone off. "Although I guess the place must have seemed like paradise compared to Hell, because the stupid fuck went _back_."

"He re-committed himself?" Ben said. "How would that even work?"

"He's not a patient this time, and I think the staff probably changed in the twelve years Mikey was kickin' it sulfuric-style. Plus, who the hell ever thinks it's weird when dead people come back to Seattle? We're a city full of willfully blind retards."

"_We are going to die_," Sock said miserably as Sam did something near-impossible involving two eighteen-wheelers and third-gear.

"What do you mean, he's not a patient?" Ben asked, gripping Sock's headrest to keep from being thrown around the backseat.

"Google kicked up a wrongful death lawsuit from just yesterday. Angry rich-people parents. Apparently West Seattle's clientele has changed since Mikey was an inpatient. They're blaming a shrink there who they say okayed an OD, just like what happened to him."

"From nutso mom-murderer to fancy head-doctor?" Sock asked. "Way to make the corporate ladder your bitch, Mikey. Or cuckoo-nest ladder, I guess."

"Ten years in the place, he probably figured out how to fake it pretty well," Sam said, shrugging, and finally pulled into the Bench parking lot. "They take walk-ins for an anger management therapy group scheduled for seven tonight. We can go track him down then, and also pretend to be angry about ridiculous things, like daytime soap operas and the nutritional information on cereal boxes."

Sam brushed distractedly at his sleeves while getting out of the car. Something small with wings was orbiting him, trying to land. He wondered if they had another hornet's nest somewhere—he could think of about ten new and exciting things to do with this one, whereas when he'd had the opportunity last spring all he'd done was spray it with a fire extinguisher and then run like fuck. And that bee-soul thing, with the toaster. That would have been a lot more fun in his current condition.

"And you can not-so-discreetly send a supernatural member of the undead back to Hell in front of a bunch of people whose grasp on reality is already not functioning at full capacity," Ben concluded tiredly.

"C'monnnnnn, you know you've always wanted to see the inside of a psych hospital," Sam said cajolingly, finally managing to swat whatever it was.

"That _is_ true," Sock said. "I wonder if West Seattle is where my favorite window-wiping schizophrenic went to. I'd like to see him again. Also he owes me five dollars." Ben gave him a look. "Well, he never wiped my windows, _did he_?" Sock said. "What kind of person would I be if I encouraged poor life skills like that?"

Sam was dead certain he'd gotten the little fucker, but now he couldn't find its little buggy corpse. He examined his hand for insect guts.

"You guys," Andi said as soon as they walked in the door, her face lined with stress. "Ted's back."

"So?" Sam said. "Is he throwing himself a going-away party? Did he bring cake?" The buzzing came back.

"No," Andi said, her eyes darting frantically in the direction of the break room. "He's _back_-back. His drug test was negative and apparently the kids he sold weed to couldn't identify him? Now he's on a friggin' _rampage_."

"God damn it, I should have known I forgot something," Sam said angrily, then slapped his arm again. "What the fuck?" he snarled. Now there were two of them. "Where are these things coming from?"

Andi stared.

"_What things_?" Ben asked, making his new Sam-You're-Testing-My-Friendship face.

"The bugs?" Sam sneered. One of them finally landed long enough for him to get a good look at it. "Shit, look at that!"

"Look at what?" Sock asked, peering at Sam's outstretched fist, where a freakish beetle-bee hybrid thing was crawling back and forth. Sam wanted to pulverize it. He slammed his palm down on top of it, but even though he had felt its tiny pin-prick legs just a split-second before, it vanished without a trace again.

Then four more appeared, buzzing in the air and crawling on Sam's pant-legs.

"There's nothing there, Sam," Andi said as Sam flailed in what was probably not a very dignified manner, not that dignity had mattered much to him recently. It was just this was fucking _freaking him out_.

"Are you retarded?" Sam cried. "They're _everywhere_."

"Sam," Sock said, tugging his sleeve suddenly, "Hide!"

"Oliver!" snapped Ted from the express check-out counter. "My office, _now_."

_Oh, thank god_. Sam really wanted an excuse to kill something right now, and if he couldn't kill these bugs then Ted was a good second-best. Maybe the bugs would find a decomposing body more interesting and finally leave him alone.

"You don't have to like me," Ted said in a tightly-controlled voice once he had shut his office door firmly behind them, "But what you did yesterday was completely inappropriate and uncalled for."

"Your _existence_ is inappropriate and uncalled for, but we've mostly let it slide thus far," Sam said distractedly, scratching at his neck as one of the beetle-bee things crawled over his skin there. He began looking around the office for a weapon.

"I thought we had a real rapport, Sam," Ted was saying, "I didn't ask anything more of our relationship than I thought you could give, and playing on my emotions was needlessly cruel."

"Needlessly cruel is a good description for me," Sam agreed, but his attention was on the rising number of beetle-bee bugs crawling around on Ted's desk. One of the box-cutters from stock was tucked between a pamphlet on Loss Prevention and an instructional DVD on workplace safety. Sam wasn't aware of how widely he was grinning. Ted backed up a little bit.

"Sam," Ted began hesitantly, "The illegal substance you planted on me—what other kinds of… things have you been… partaking of?"

Sam clawed at his face, trying to clear the beetle-bees off. He was going to make a really big mess if he couldn't _concentrate_.

"Because what kind of boss would I _be_ if I let you work under the influence of an illegal substance, Sam?" Ted said nervously. Something clicked in Sam's head.

"Fucking devil-bugs!" Sam shouted. Ted backed up sharply again, knocking one of his framed posters of someone rock-climbing off the wall. "What the shit do invisible bugs have to do with escaped mental patients?!" He finally snatched up the box cutter, but he was far too angry at The Devil and these fucking bugs to remember his plan about Ted now. He started stabbing at them as they scuttled across Ted's desk.

Ted had opened his office door and was leaning out, but seemed too confused and terrified to figure out what to do after that. Sam gave up trying to pin the demon-spawn beetle-bees with his box cutter and started smashing the desk with his chair instead.

"I already called an ambulance," Andi said from outside.

"You are getting an overtime bonus for that alone," Ted said, sounding lost.

"THIS IS THE LOUSIEST SUPERNATURAL POWER EVER," Sam shouted at the floor, then kicked the desk over and threw the chair at the wall. "FUCK YOU, SATAN! FUCK YOU!" A beetle-bee crawled in his mouth. Sam started throwing himself up against the wall, howling incomprehensibly.

Sock folded his arms uncomfortably at the door to Ted's office while Andi and Ben went to look for something that could stall him if he decided to turn on something besides the wall and his invisible bugs before the paramedics arrived. Ted looked like someone had punched him in the gut. "We should have made him stay home today," Sock admitted, "But he was looking forward to hiding secret caches of meat in the Hygiene and Health Care aisle _so much_."

--

Later, Sam would remember the next few hours like the camera footage Sock had taken on their camping trip before Sam's senior year in high school: a few seconds here, a few seconds there, a blank blue-screen every three or four shots, the camera bouncing up and down at odd angles. A voice-off screen and a jerky pan to the left. The camera focusing in and out uncertainly.

Only this time instead of ten minutes of Sock trying to light a fire and a bad night-vision shot of Sam investigating what might have been a bear (it turned out to be a bunny), every shot was more inexplicably distressing than the last: the beetle-bees crawling over an oblivious Andi, the hands and feet of the paramedics while Sam struggled on the concrete floor of the Bench, the bouncing interior of an ambulance, the shadowed faces of total strangers silhouetted by the glow of fluorescent lights. An IV bag with a single beetle-bee crawling inside of it, swimming in the fluid. The paramedics had stuck him with some type of sedative in the ambulance on the way over, but a complete and unquenchable fury had overtaken him-- a combination of the bloodlust he had felt while tracking Souls and the helpless agony that Ben had been so convinced was a good sign. Whatever was in the beetle-bee's IV bag must have been much worse, though, because it is finally working.

Sam is drowning. They are trying to kill him, trying to smother him just because they hate him for finally, _finally_ being good at something. He would kill them all if he could only move his goddamn arms. He can barely turn his head.

He can barely move a thing.

--

When he woke up the beetle-bees were gone. Also, his mouth tasted like cat-litter. Sam grimaced, tried to bring his hands up to rub his face, and found them immobilized in wide, robin's-egg-blue velcro cuffs.

Wonderful. Someone was going to pay for this. Sam could feel the boredom edging in through the haze of drug-induced calm already and he'd only been conscious for a few seconds.

His mother was sitting in a chair a few feet away. "Hello, sweetie," she said with a watery smile.

Sam narrowed his eyes to consider her. Instinct told him she deserved to have her eyes clawed out, but medication was clearly no match for his superior intellectual capacity now, because his brain was starting to work faster again already.

"Mom," he said, "My wrists hurt."

She looked away from him. Sam rolled his eyes.

"Really bad," he added, conjuring a voice-quiver for her benefit.

She relented and came to his side. "It's all going to be okay now, baby," she told him, ripping up the Velcro. Sam didn't wait for her to move to the other side and undo his right wrist. Just the idea of being restrained was enough to make him want to yank his hair out, or yank someone else's hair out. Yank her hair out, maybe.

"I should fucking kill you," Sam growled. She put her hand to her mouth to muffle a sound of dismay.

Sam frowned. He hadn't actually meant to say that. But he felt even less in control than he'd been before.

A doctor came in, looked at Sam, looked at Sam's mother, and then leaned back out of the room. He didn't take his eyes off of them.

"Hey, Johnny, come give me a hand over here?" the doctor said to someone else. Then he came back into the room and smiled a tight, professional smile. "Hello, Sam."

Sam ignored him and went to strip the adhesive off of the little IV-bag needle.

"Don't do that, Sam," said the doctor. A man in scrubs—Johnny, Sam guessed—moved to the other side of the bed. "Please don't make this hard on your mother."

"My mother is the reason I'm here in the first place," Sam spat. "You want to strap someone to a bed? She's the one who sold her first-born's soul to _The Devil_. You want crazy? _That's_ fucking crazy."

Sam's mother pressed her hand harder to her mouth and scrunched up the rest of her face, rocking back and forth on her heels a little. The doctor apparently only had two facial expressions. He employed his less polite one.

"Fuck you, bitch!" Sam said. "You don't get to _cry_ about this. Tell them the truth! You did this to me. The Devil sent fucking invisible demon-bugs after me because DAD couldn't handle just dying like everyone else! And now you're trying to act like I'm the bad person here?" He scoffed. "I'm the only sane person I know. The rest of you are _idiots_."

"How long have you felt like this, Sam?" the doctor asked, professionally detached.

"I don't feel anything!" Sam said. "I don't _need_ to feel anything. I don't _want_ to feel anything. I have a job to do."

"It sounds like you were feeling something at your workplace," the doctor said, looking at a clipboard. Sam wondered if there were things in his room he could use to kill the doctor with. The IV pole was a possibility.

"I was covered in freakish hell-bugs," Sam said disdainfully, "I think I held up well given the circumstances."

"Have you ever had a problem with things other people couldn't see before?" the doctor asked, taking a moment to raise his eyes from the clipboard. He was giving Sam a serious newscaster look. Sam grabbed the IV pole and got about halfway to the end of his bed before Johnny was on top of him and the doctor was calling more people into the room. Sam got a few bites in, but not much more. He was going to have to work on that.

"Based on what his coworkers said and his behavior right now," the doctor was saying to Sam's mother in the corner of the room as Sam gnashed his teeth at the person doing something new to his IV bag, "I would recommend having him transferred to a private inpatient program. He's not going to get the help he needs here."

"But what's _wrong_ with him?" Sam's mother asked. "He's never acted anything like this before."

"YOU LYING WHORE, YOU DID THIS TO ME," Sam screamed.

"Has he been under any kind of unusual stress lately?" the doctor asked her, pointedly ignoring Sam. Sam's mother closed her eyes.

"I've been working part-time for The fucking Devil!" Sam yelled at him. "But that hasn't been half as stressful as having to live around pieces of SHIT like all of YOU."

"C'mon, buddy," said Johnny. "It's night-night time now." If Sam had his way, Johnny was going to go night-night for _good_, really fucking soon.

"How come the one time I'm not telling people ridiculous lies," Sam demanded, the feeling that he was drowning coming back, "_Everyone's a fucking skeptic_?"

--

After that, the poorly-edited-video-feed sensation came back for a while, and Sam got the opportunity to experience several hours of his life on fast-forward, which would have been kind of funny if he hadn't felt like he was dying at the same time. And also if everyone around him wasn't being so fucking obnoxious.

Sam tried to focus on his favorite pastime—imagining how to kill people around him, or blow things up—but he couldn't even get his thoughts to stay in the right order. Even his insides were merry-go-rounding on him, words falling over on top of each other and bouncing around his skull in disarray.

Finally, his first coherent thought in hours was:

_The next person who comes near me is going to get puke all over their shoes._

Sam turned his head to the side to look for a likely target. He squinted. He could see his mom and dad, down the hall at a counter, holding pens and looking serious. He wondered if talking to them would get them to come closer at this point; everyone had taken to ignoring his slurred cursing and complaining after his first outburst in the hospital.

He frowned. He wasn't _in_ the hospital anymore, although it looked like _a_ hospital. He was on a gurney again, like in the ambulance. How had he gotten here? He tried to remember what had happened directly before deciding to vomit on someone, but he suspected that his actual memories had shuffled around a bit in the last few hours.

"In case you're wondering," said a voice, "you probably deserve whatever it is you're getting."

Sam turned his head in the other direction. There was a girl leaning around the corner a few feet from him, her hands gripping the wall as if she might slip without it there to steady her.

"I'm the only blameless person in this entire place. I'm a good person," she said.

"Who the fuck are you?" Sam asked blearily. His voice didn't come out exactly like he expected it to.

"It's not fair," she said. "I'm only here because I'm a good person. I'm just worried about _bad people_. So of course, what do they do? Fill this place with _more_ bad people," she scowled. "What bad thing have _you_ done? Tell me now so I know ahead of time."

"I let the Devil put my soul in a jam jar," Sam said. "I probably would have been okay, but I liked it too much."

She sighed. "Great, another Nessie."

"Are you calling me gay?" Sam asked, then decided he didn't care. "Where am I?"

"They've got you on the _good_ stuff, don't they?" she commented, apparently feeling more charitable now that she had established something important about Sam. "Don't worry, all the involuntaries are always a little out of it when they first come in. They like you better that way." She paused, as if to recall what his actual question had been. "You're in West Seattle Psych."

Sam blinked.

Well, that worked out alright. He frowned. He hoped he could get back out when he was done.

Also, he didn't have his vessel anymore.

"Crap," he said. Wall-clingy girl laughed delightedly.

"Mary," said yet another voice, "You know you're not supposed to do that." Mary managed to look repentant and shy further behind the wall at the same time. It took a serious effort for Sam to turn his head back in the other direction. There was a huge mustache with a man attached to it, standing way too close. "Go back to the common room," Mustache Man said. Then he looked down at Sam.

"You're looking lucid," he remarked. "Can you tell me what happened?"

"How do you _eat_?" Sam asked, trying to stall so he could think of an explanation that would get him off this stupid gurney. "Do you just constantly move it out of the way, or do you need a little comb afterwards or what?"

Mustache Man smiled and turned away from Sam to look at his parents, who were still standing awkwardly by the nurse's station. They didn't come any closer. "I think we can take it from here," Mustache Man called down to them reassuringly.

"We'll come see you tomorrow morning, okay, honey?" Sam's mother called down the hall.

"Behave, Sam," said his dad seriously, as if Sam were nine again and sleeping over at Sock's. Sam decided not to respond; he didn't trust himself not to start cursing at them again. He couldn't understand why he'd never been angry at them before—not that he regretted not having a soul now, or being a Reaper, but he should have at least been able to get something awesome in return for the sale of his soul, like a pony or a really hot girlfriend.

"I'm not crazy," Sam tried.

"Nobody here is crazy," Mustache Man told him. "If I un-strap you, do I have your word that you'll try to cooperate with me and my staff?"

"I'm not going to try and attack anyone with an IV pole again, if that's what you mean," Sam said. "Although I don't think that actually would have hurt him."

"Hm," said Mustache Man, "Good enough for now. I should warn you, though, that everyone here has a lot of practice keeping patients from hurting themselves or others. You'll just end up in four-points again."

"I'm glad that we're establishing boundaries right off the bat, patronizing mustache man," Sam said, rubbing his arm where the strap had been digging in and trying to sit up without falling over. "Here's my boundary: if you hadn't agreed to untie me I was going to puke all over your shoes." He closed his eyes as he finally got himself fully upright and felt the room swing on an axis. "And I still might, but it wouldn't be anything personal," he added.

"The sedatives you've been on while the hospital transferred you here can sometimes have that effect. I have a trashcan in my office, you can hold onto that while we have a little talk."

The office in question was only a few feet away, but Sam found himself hugging the wall the same way Mary had. He hoped this cleared up soon, because it was going to be a bitch and a half capturing the soul if he couldn't even walk upright.

In the office, Mustache Man offered him a tiny plastic cup of water and a classy-looking trashcan with a plastic bag liner. Sam accepted both, although the first made him feel less like he needed the second. He noticed that his shoes were missing.

"My name is Dr. Aidan Howard, Sam," he said, and proceeded to perform some kind of verbal checklist for Sam's benefit, "and I'm the senior of two head psychiatrists here at West Seattle Psychiatric Hospital. You were transferred here from Harborview Medical Center, at your parents' request, after your Attending Physician suggested that you may have had a psychotic break. We aren't here to prove that you're '_nuts_,'" he said, smiling again like he was in on some kind of secret, "We're here to make sure you get better. Since you are an adult, we cannot by law detain you here for longer than seventy-two hours without your permission."

"So I can go home in three days?" Sam said quickly.

"I hope after three days, you and I will be able to evaluate together whether or not you should leave," Dr. Howard corrected.

"Yeah-huh," Sam said doubtfully. If he couldn't manage to capture the Escaped Soul in three days he'd commit suicide on principal. Provided he wasn't drugged to the gills the entire time and he could convince Sock and Ben to bring him the fucking vessel.

"Can I make a phone call?" Sam asked.

"May I enquire as to whom it is you'd like to call?" Dr. Howard asked. That was, like, eight words longer than that sentence needed to be. Sam wanted to throttle him but he didn't think he could clench his hands that effectively yet, or even stand up straight long enough to actually kill him.

"Well, I figure I might as well start the party off right, call a one-nine-hundred number. Get in the mood," Sam said.

"Humor is an excellent coping mechanism and I hope you employ it to your advantage," Dr. Howard said. Sam was definitely going to arrange to puke on him sometime in the next three days.

"I just want to call my friends," Sam said.

Howard consulted a piece of paper in front of him. "Bert and Ben?" he asked. They sounded like a pair of muppets that way, which actually felt kind of accurate.

"I don't really have any others," Sam admitted. "Unless you count The Devil, and I don't really, right now."

The look in Howard's eye said Sam had managed to knock him out of his smug little cloud of euphoria, which was funny enough that Sam almost didn't mind when he said, "Maybe tomorrow," and offered to take him to the common room to settle in. However the fuck you settled into a funny farm.

Sam realized that he probably shouldn't have admitted to being in league with The Devil to a psychiatrist. Not only did he desperately not want to hear whatever retarded shrink mumbo-jumbo this guy came up with, but it also might get back to Mikey, wherever that little bitch was hiding. If the Escaped Soul escaped while Sam was trapped in a psych ward the irony would kill him where he stood.

The common room managed to look superficially clean while still maintaining the impression that everything in it was slightly sticky and probably smelled like pee. Mary the Judgmental Crack Whore was sitting on a loveseat with another girl about her age who looked like she might actually _be_ a crack whore. A few other people were in the room, two of whom were watching everyone else with too much self-assurance to be fellow patients. Sam sat down in a chair with plastic orange cushions, because otherwise he was going to fall on his face.

"Aidan," said a dumpy middle-aged woman from a corridor to Sam's right, "Nessie and Chris are escalating off of each other again, and Pack Rat's lost something down the toilet again." Sam closed his eyes in relief; it had looked like Howard was going to start introducing him and Sam really, really didn't care.

"Nessie's a schizophrenic like you," Mary said, leaning over the back of the couch. "Just so you know. Maybe you two can be friends."

"I'm not schizophrenic," Sam said. "And I'm not going to be here very long."

"I doubt two schizophrenics would be compatible, Mary," a guy about Sam's age said quietly from the corner, "Their delusions probably wouldn't synch up."

"Besides, all of Nessie's delusions are happy delusions," said Crack Whore. "This guy thinks he sold his soul to Satan. Doesn't really work."

"I didn't sell my soul to Satan," Sam said indignantly. "My parents did."

"Whoo boy," said an older woman from near the window.

"No fighting," admonished one of the hospital workers, without looking up from his book. Everyone was quiet for a minute or so.

"I'm Mary," Mary said. "And this is Temperance," she continued, gesturing to Crack Whore. "She's here because she's bulimic. It's not her fault."

"Everyone wants me to be ugly," Temperance said.

"And I'm Eddie and I'm here because _I!_ _Love! Heroin!_" said someone from the floor.

"And Addison is here because she stabbed a lady at her work with a ballpoint pen," Mary continued, pointing solemnly at the sarcastic older woman.

"The bitch deserved it, she was trying to get me fired," Addison said, pointing at Mary and looking like she was continuing an argument from before.

"And Mark is here because he hates himself," Mary finished. The quiet guy from the corner waved embarrassedly.

"I'm Sam," Sam said flatly. "And I'm not going to explain to you fucks why I'm here if you're not going to believe me."

"We don't really care what your problems are anyway," Temperance said helpfully.

"I care," said Eddie from the floor. "Gimme some dirt!"

"Nobody's getting dirt on anybody," droned the other hospital worker.

"_Everybody has dirt on somebody_," Eddie whispered conspiratorially, "_especially the employees_."

That was good to know.

--

Sam had to sit through an episode and a half of America's Next Top Model—he couldn't understand why a heroin addict and an anorexic would be allowed to watch that, but the two staff members didn't really seem to care as long as nobody got into a fight—before he felt steady enough to get up and walk around. This unfortunately coincided with The Evening Meal, as the dumpy middle-aged woman who had called Dr. Howard away before referred to it, herding Sam along with the others to a long, low cafeteria. The two staff members from the common area didn't come with, but two new ones were already there to replace them, one of them cajoling a slumped-over man a few years older than Sam into sitting up.

"Please be meatloaf," said Eddie, who Sam noticed now was wearing a lot of poorly-applied make-up for someone named Eddie. Temperance shuddered.

"So, let me get this straight," Sam said as they sat down, "Your parents named you Temperance, and now you hate eating?"

She stared at him blankly.

"She doesn't fulfill the moral requirements of true Temperance," moaned the man who had already been here, from the end of the table. "She's obsessed with vanity. She must abandon her obsession with physical beauty before she can obtain true perfection."

"I hate polluting my body," Temperance said. "All of this food is poison. You're killing yourselves."

"I wish," joked Mark. At least Sam thought he was joking.

A few more people were brought in by other hospital employees. Sam watched the door to see if Mikey showed up, but he didn't. One of the new arrivals started stealing everyone else's plastic flatware and placing them in neat piles.

"That's Pack Rat," Mary said. "He's obsessive-compulsive."

"I can see that," Sam said. Pack Rat tapped his palm against his forehead a few times, then began redistributing the flatware.

"Good job, Patrick," praised one of the hospital workers. Sam felt like he was in nursery school again.

"I'm Sister," said a woman in her thirties, rocking back and forth in her seat a little bit. "Hello, nice to meet you." Sam noticed she was staring intently at her plastic plate. Another nameless hospital worker came out and started serving dinner. When he tried to put food on her plate she shrieked and yanked it away.

"_If she can't see her reflection she flips out_," whispered Eddie. The hospital worker sighed and put Sister's food on a different plate.

This was the most boring thing that had ever happened to him. He wondered if he could just _ask_ if anybody knew anyone named Mike who might also be killing patients here.

"So, I know everyone else's hang-ups," Sam said as they were eating. "What's yours, Mary? You can't not have any, unless your hang-up is just that you love staying in psychiatric hospitals."

"Mary doesn't like men," Eddie said. Sam noticed that she seemed fairly comfortable sitting between Eddie and Temperance, just like in the common room, but Sam was beginning to suspect that Eddie didn't count himself as a man.

"You're all rapists and murderers," she sneered.

"I wouldn't touch you if you were the last woman on earth," Sam said, "Although I _can_ kill you without touching you. So I guess there's still that."

Mary paled.

One of the staff members frowned at him. "Sam, that's not how we talk to each other here."

"Her piety is sprung of vanity," said the man at the end of the table. "Her virtuous nature is a lie."

"Go to Hell, Chris," said Mary. Chris threw some mashed potatoes at her.

"Chris wants to be martyred for God," Eddie confided. "You two could have some really interesting conversations."

"Sam works for Satan, Chris," Temperance informed him. Chris had to be restrained from leaping out of his chair to attack Sam with a plastic fork. He bellowed something about a crusade before calming suddenly and slumping in his chair again.

"Tempe," Eddie said, "You're not going to eat that, right?"

"Temperance has to eat what's on her plate," one of the staff members said.

"What are we, five?" Sam asked incredulously.

"You can have my food if you want," Chris said, suddenly coherent again. "To abstain for the Lord is my only wish."

"This is food, not sex," Eddie said bemusedly.

Pack Rat offered him a plate of meticulously organized carrot sticks.

_I had no idea crazy people were this tedious and dull, _Sam thought.

"You can have the rest of my plate," Sam said easily, "I'm still a little nauseous from the meds, I think." Eddie eagerly dragged Sam's plate over to himself and dug in. "Hey, how come you don't have the shakes or anything?" Sam asked.

"Oh, I detoxed ages ago," Eddie said around the food in his mouth. "They just love me too much to let me go."

"So you've been here a while?" Sam asked.

"Yeah, but not as long as Mary," Eddie said. Mary looked almost proud about that. Weird fucking bitch. Sam wondered how much damage he could do to her with a plastic fork before the staff managed to split them up.

"So, how safe is this place?" Sam asked. "I've always heard horror stories: orderlies with a hard-on for power trips, right, and nurses who get bored of doing the crossword all day long and decide to smother some patient with a pillow."

The staff members shifted nervously. "Try to keep it positive, people," one of them said.

"I'm not trying to put you folks in an awkward place," Sam said congenially, "It's just I promised myself in high school I'd either die on national television or have a heart-attack while playing Grand Theft Auto at ninety, and I'd hate to have to give up on my goals because of one rotten apple."

"Stop trying to suck up, bitch," said Angry Addison from where she was jealously eyeing Eddie's extra plate.

"There was an accident," Mary said. "But it was accidental."

"Who had an accident?" Sam prodded.

"Ira," Eddie sneered. "I'm glad he's gone."

"Nobody is happy about anyone dying," said one of the staff people.

"What happened?" Sam asked. Jesus, it was like pulling teeth.

"Turns out there's a significant difference between a hundred milligrams and ten milligrams of something," said Temperance. "Although all of the stuff they try to put us on is dangerous."

"Yeah, no kidding," Sam said, "Who was responsible for that?"

"No one's responsible for accidents," insisted Mary, seeming offended that anyone here would be accused of a mistake, "She didn't mean to do it."

"She?" Sam asked. _Shit. Shit. She?_

"Dr. Daley," Mary confirmed. "But she told me she has a really good lawyer and I shouldn't worry about it."

"If we didn't have to worry about it she'd have come back to work afterwards," Temperance said. "Oh my god! We should make her a card."

"Like a 'get better soon' card," said Eddie, "but for getting your ass sued by crazy yuppies who raised a total sociopathic dick who couldn't go ten minutes without trying to beat someone with a chair."

"That's very positive, Eddie," said one of the staff members, "… except for the part where you were speaking ill of the dead."

_She? _Sam thought, now genuinely nauseous again. If he was in the wrong fucking hospital he was never going to live this down.

--

Sam's sense of time was pretty fucked at that point, but it still felt like lights-out came way too early.

"I haven't had a set bedtime since…" Sam paused to think. "… Ever. I'm not doing this shit. I only need two or three hours of sleep anyway," he told the orderly.

"That sounds about in line with the rest of your symptoms," the orderly said calmly. "You'll discuss this with Dr. Howard in the morning, but in the meantime your ass needs to cooperate or we're gonna put you on so many drugs you won't know what a phone is, much less be able to use one to call your friends."

"I'm not cooperating!" Eddie said gleefully. "Put my ass on drugs!"

"Can't I just sit in the common room and watch infomercials?" Sam asked. "I'll even put them on mute, they're funnier that way."

The orderly ignored both of them. "Last room on the left, Sammy," he said, pointing down a corridor. "Don't disturb Jamie. Or maybe do disturb Jamie, I guess he could use disturbing."

Lying to these people was harder, because they seemed constantly to expect it. Sam missed the outside world.

He flopped down on an empty bed, trying to angle his head to see out the window. They'd made him take pills after dinner and even though he wasn't as fucked up as before they were still making him fuzzy and dull-feeling. He tried to fight through them to think of a way to destroy something in the room, but even the other patient was boring. Sam could tell he wasn't asleep, but he wasn't opening his eyes either.

"Hey, other crazy person," he whispered. "Don't try to eat my brains in the middle of the night, okay?"

No response.

"Even though I fucked your mom," Sam said. "That's actually why I'm in here, nobody could believe a sane person would fuck that kind of skanky whore of their own free will, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for fat chicks."

"He's clinically depressed," said yet another orderly from the door, "He didn't acknowledge his mother screaming and crying at him for two hours yesterday, I don't think he's going to care if she's been fucking some scrawny bitch like you."

"I like a challenge," Sam said, "which his _mom_ wasn't."

"That's pretty admirable," said the orderly, indistinguishable from all the other hospital workers here in the dim light from the hallway. "Are you going to let me four-point you for the night, or do we have to wait until Andy's done with his groups and force the issue?"

"I don't need to be restrained," Sam said, "I'm not going to do anything."

"S'not what your chart says, buddy," the orderly said apologetically, straightening the covers on Jamie's bed. "I don't make the rules."

"I don't control my newly-discovered violent hatred of being restrained for hours at a time," Sam said, "But I'll kick the shit out of you to make sure it doesn't happen, so I guess we're at an impasse." He got out of bed. "Why don't I just go use the restroom, and we'll discuss this again when I come out?" None of the bathrooms had locks, but Sam was pretty sure if he could drag a chair in there he could prop the door closed, and hopefully the orderlies wouldn't care enough to force the issue. Or the door open. If Sam could sleep on a roof alright he'd be fine on a tile floor.

"You already used the bathroom," said the orderly, blocking him from getting to the door.

"Don't be a pee Nazi, man," Sam said, and made a break for it.

Being drugged _sucked_. The orderly was on him before he'd gotten half a step.

Sam snarled and tried to bite the orderly, his foot managing to unbalance him a little bit, but the other guy had a weight and height advantage, and also probably didn't feel like his brain was covered in cotton. Sam was at least putting up too much of a fight for the restraint thing to happen, but he wasn't getting away either. In the other bed, Jamie's eyes had opened but he didn't seem to really be watching them.

Two against one settled the matter: the orderly from the hallway turned on the lights and came to help his coworker. Sam put all of his remaining energy into thrashing as hard as possible, but the velcro cuffs were back again and even worse than before. Sam howled in frustrated anguish and gave them a graphic description of their deaths.

"Jesus, you are not making a good argument for why we shouldn't restrain you at night, buddy," one of the orderlies said. Sam tried to calm himself down enough to deny that, but once he was actually looking at the two of them in the harsh overhead light his insides froze up.

Mikey Nelson was his orderly.

It would have been like a Western movie, two desperados making eye contact and then _ba-dum_! that wacky Western gong-noise and then some sort of pseudo-Cherokee windpipe music starts up as they stare each other down. Except that Sam was tied to a fucking bed, and none of the Westerns he'd ever watched had that particular BDSM element to them.

"Huh," said the orderly from the hallway, "That got him to calm down." He clapped Mikey on the shoulder. "You _are_ good at this."

"I've had a lot of experience," Mikey said slowly.

Down the hall something shattered and Addison started shrieking incoherently. Simultaneously—perhaps in correlation to the first fact—someone started sobbing loudly. The orderly that wasn't a psychopathic murderer hurried off, leaving Sam alone and at the mercy of an Escaped Soul from Hell.

This was _not_ cool.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5, Guilt Complex**

"Ben," said Sock after nearly a solid minute of sitting in the car, staring dumbly at the building in front of them, "What if they try to make us _stay_?"

"We're not nuts, Sock," Ben reassured him. "That's an irrational fear, and I told you, we can't have those again until Sam is back to normal and can whine at us that we're being irrational."

"No, I mean, they think he's crazy because he believes he's being controlled by Satan, right? Not for the actual reason that he's crazy, which is that he doesn't _care_ anymore that he's being controlled by Satan."

Ben paused to evaluate this, then nodded. "Yes."

"Ben, we _also_ believe that he's being controlled by Satan."

"Oh crap," Ben said, gripping the steering wheel and clenching his teeth. He exhaled loudly. "They can't commit us just because of that, we're not a danger to ourselves or anyone else. We just can't let them see that we're enabling Sam when we go to talk to him. Damn it!" he swore. "We should have come up with code words in case this ever happened."

"Alpha Five to Crazy Horse," Sock said, "Breaker breaker, is your pony flipping its lid? Tuna off-radar, permission to headhunt!"

"Sock, if you ever talk like that again _I'll _have you committed," Ben said. His eyes widened and he ducked behind the wheel. "Down!"

Sock hit his face on the gear shift. "What are we hiding from?"

"Sam's mom and dad. They're _both _crying."

"Sam gets his emotional sensitivity from both sides, it's true," Sock said. "Or he did."

"He's going to be sensitive again, don't worry," Ben said, "We are going to fix this."

Someone rapped on the passenger side window.

"Benjamin?" Sam's mom said though her tears, her nose red and a tissue crumpled in her fist, "Bert?"

"_Oh no, real names_," Sock whimpered, "_I can't handle this_."

"_Open the window, you coward_," Ben hissed through a strained smile.

"_I can't, the car's not on, dickwad_!"

"Are you two alright?" Sam's dad said, staring blankly at them from over his wife's shoulder. Ben moaned quietly in pain and opened his door.

"Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver," he said, standing up and looking at them from over the top of the car, "We didn't know you'd seen us—uh, I mean, we didn't see _you_."

"We were wondering why Sam's car was in the parking lot," Mrs. Oliver said numbly. Ben glanced down. _Oh, yeah_.

Sock squirmed across the front seat and fell out of the car on Ben's side rather than open the passenger-side door and stand too close to Sam's parents.

"We thought he'd want it here," Ben lied, "You know, when he gets out." Actually it was just way cushier than either of their cars.

"Oh, honey," Mrs. Oliver said, "Sam's not going to leave anytime soon." She started crying in earnest again.

Sock finally stood up straight and looked at Sam's parents in confusion. "But what about…" he put his hands up next to his head and bent his fingers to indicate horns, "… you know?" Ben elbowed him in the gut. Mrs. Oliver cried even harder.

"If there's anything good that will come of this," Mr. Oliver said soberly, "It's that at least this way, Sam's not of any use to _him_. He can live out the rest of his life safely."

"_In the nut house_," Sock said. Ben kicked him as subtly as possible. Mrs. Oliver was crying so hard she was doubled over. "And then he _still_ goes to _Hell_ when he dies."

Mrs. Oliver collapsed into her husband's arms. Ben dragged Sock away as quickly as he could. "When we talk to Sam," he said sharply, "I don't want you to say _anything_ unless you've already thought it through twice and are sure it won't send him into a psychotic fit."

--

It was a good thing Sam didn't actually need much sleep anymore, because he hadn't last night. Slept, that is. Not that being awake for his own horrible murder would have made much difference when he couldn't move his limbs, but he'd felt like he was making an important point by keeping his eyes open and trained on the door for the entire nine hours that Mikey was on shift.

And, added bonus: he'd been able to nod off to sleep while his mother was crying all over the place and trying to apologize for everything. His roommate had the right idea; not reacting at all to her hysterics actually garnered even more entertaining, satisfying results. Sam had still given him the what-for once Mikey was gone, though.

"Seriously? Seriously?" he'd said angrily, still trying to wiggle his wrists out of their restraints. "That guy wants to _kill_ me, would you please blink or fart or something so I know I can rely on you to yell for another orderly when he tries to smother me with my pillow tonight?"

No response.

"You're worse than my last roommates, Jamie," Sam said, "And my last roommates are the ones who let me be committed in the first place."

So, speak of the Devil. Not literally, of course, although Sam was finally starting to really hope The Devil did show up soon and at least do something amusingly awful to liven things up.

"Sam, you look like crap," Ben said when he sat down in the chair that Sam's mother had only just vacated a few minutes ago.

"Eat crap," Sam said. "I'm going to die because of you two. I don't _want_ to die! I am the only person in this place who _doesn't_ want to die!" he gestured angrily at Jamie to illustrate his point, his wrists still red and chafed from the night before. The morning-shift orderly had let him go when his parents came in, although he'd stayed to keep an eye on Sam while they were there. His behavior had apparently been sufficiently subdued during that visit to convince them not to sit in on Sock and Ben's.

"You're not going to die," Sock said, "in fact you're probably less likely to die here than out there, 'cause let's face it, you were kind of bound to get yourself shot or stabbed or something. Possibly by Ted."

Sam scoffed. "Ted's harmless. He's got the survival instincts of a lemming—he's lucky I was distracted by hallucinations yesterday, or his cold, lifeless corpse would still be waiting to be discovered with the mannequins in the Sporting Goods section."

"_Sam_," Ben said, putting his hands to his face.

"But do you know who _is_ dangerous?" Sam snarled. "The fucking Escaped Soul who just spent all of last night staring at my helpless form, probably fantasizing about ways in which to kill me tonight!"

Ben looked doubtful. "No, Sam, you're not in danger from the Escaped Soul here, alright? The first thing we did when the nurse at Harborview told us you were being sent here was check up on that lawsuit, and the Soul's not allowed to come back to work until the case has been dealt with. You're probably safer from it here than you are out there."

"Okay, first of all," Sam said indignantly, "I thought we'd established by now that I can totally handle myself around Escaped Souls now, as long as I'm on even fucking footing. And second of all, I'm not retarded, I saw the fucking Soul last night. He's an _orderly_."

"That doesn't make any sense," Ben said, "is the doctor thing just a coincidence?"

"I don't know," Sam scowled, "I'm not psychic." Sock made a face like he maybe doubted this. "But whatever's going on, I need you to get me the vessel before tonight so I can capture this fuck and _leave_ on time."

"Your parents think you aren't leaving," Sock said nervously.

"Oh, like Hell I'm not," Sam said. "They just think I'm halfway to catatonic. I napped through their visit. The head psychiatrist here said they can't hold me longer than seventy-two hours because the only person I attacked during my Devil-induced freak-out was that doctor shmuck at Harborview, and he's not pressing charges."

"But you _wanted_ to attack Ted," Ben said, looking for clarification. "You were seriously going to kill him in cold blood?"

"Well, duh," Sam said, "Except nobody would have caught me if I'd been in my right mind, obviously."

Sock glanced at Jamie, still lying apathetically in bed. Sam wondered if he peed there. He couldn't smell any pee, but considering the various contending smells that didn't mean a whole lot. "Don't worry about him," Sam said, "this whole room could collapse on his ass and he wouldn't so much as clench his cheeks."

"Sam," Ben said slowly, "If we bring you the vessel, you have to promise me something."

"What?" Sam asked, annoyed.

Ben swallowed nervously. "Stay here until we find a way to get your soul back."

"_What_?" Sam repeated, this time in a decidedly different tone of voice.

"We'll bring you the vessel," Ben explained, "And you can capture the soul, and we'll drop it off at the DMV. But then you have to stay here, voluntarily, until The Devil comes looking for you and you can ask for your soul back, okay?"

"Fuck you!" Sam said. "What makes you think I want my fucking soul back? Shove it up your ass, Ben, I'm leaving in two days and I'm going to enjoy the shit out of every goddamn moment, alright? Do you have any idea what it's like here? I just ate fruit Jell-O for breakfast! And everything smells like puke!"

"Then we won't bring you your fucking vessel!" Ben snapped.

"You _fucker_!" Sam bellowed and pounced on Ben, grabbing him by the neck and squeezing. "Do you want me to DIE? Is that it? Was this your plan all along?!"

Sock grabbed Sam around the middle and tried to pull him off Ben, shouting for help and also for Sam to snap out of it, but Sam only dragged a gagging Ben with him. "You've been against me from the beginning, you piece of shit!" Sam accused. "I should have killed you _both_ after you tried to stop me from doing my job the _first_ time!"

"What do you mean, both?!" Sock cried, dropping Sam in shock. Then there were orderlies and a nurse in the room, and Sam was face-down on the bed, still screaming what might have been words in Ben's direction.

Outside of Sam's room, a concerned looking man with a huge mustache asked Ben if he wanted them to contact the police so he could press charges.

"Yeah," Ben said, "I do."

"I thought you told _me_ not to do anything that could send Sam into a psychotic fit," Sock said angrily when the man left, drawing Ben further away from Sam's room, where they could still hear him shouting, although now it sounded like he might be bargaining with someone.

"Stop complaining," Ben said, rubbing his throat, "And call Josie. I need to know if I can _drop_ the charges as soon as Sam gets his soul back so we can get him out of here."

"What if Sam _never_ gets his soul back?" Sock asked quietly.

"He's going to," Ben said. "We're moving on to plan B."

"What's plan B?"

None of this was even remotely funny anymore. It had started out that way, but the longer it went on the less it became just another part of the game they'd been playing since Sam's twenty-first birthday. This was _serious_, in a way things had never been serious for them before, Ben knew, and if they _ever_ wanted to go back to the way things were, something drastic had to be done.

"We're going to summon The Devil ourselves," he said.

--

Sam got to spend the rest of the morning drugged up again. In a way this was a blessing in disguise, because it made it even easier to tune out Dr. Howard when he really got into his stride—_blah blah bipolar something or other, blah blah manic episode_—but mostly it just made it even harder to argue his case for not being in four-points.

"It's not like I'm going to strangle _Jamie_," Sam promised, his own voice sounding echo-y and metallic to his ears, "and he'd probably thank me for it if I did anyway."

"Why do you expect to be trusted when you've attacked one of your own friends?" the doctor asked impartially.

"Why do you expect to be trusted by someone you're actively thwarting at every turn?" Sam asked. "Ben wants to get me killed," Sam explained desperately, "and he's going to get what he wants if I'm still in restraints tonight. I have a _job_ to do."

"Your job for The Devil?" Howard asked. "Tell me, does that job currently include attacking a patient or an employee here?"

"Well, yes," Sam admitted, "but he's an Escaped Soul from Hell. Why is that so hard for everyone to _get_?"

The whole conversation didn't go very well, to put it simply.

When it was time for lunch two orderlies finally came and let him out of his bed, explaining something tedious about a trial period. Sam's head was still too fuzzy to do anything but nod earnestly and hug one of them blearily for releasing him. It was sort of pathetic that he couldn't think of anything more manipulative than hugs, but it seemed to do the trick. Also, he really, _really_ liked not being tied down.

"I knew you were bad," Mary said stiffly when Sam stumbled into the cafeteria, held upright mainly by the orderly he had hugged.

"Nobody here is bad," one of the nurses said, "They sometimes just do bad _things_."

"I am neither good nor bad," Sam explained dizzily, sitting down. "Without a soul I have no moral distinction, one way or the other. I'm liberated from it entirely."

"Amorality is not freedom," argued Chris. He seemed more alert today, but that was maybe only in comparison to Sam. "You are deceiving yourself."

"If you're liberated by amorality," Mary said haughtily, "How come you just spent all morning trussed up like a turkey dinner?"

Sam puked in Mary's lap.

--

Being at odds with Dr. Howard seemed to put Sam in favor with everyone but Mary. Or maybe vomiting on Mary had put him in favor with everyone but Mary, Sam couldn't really tell and didn't really care.

"Love the sinner, hate the sin," said Chris calmly when Sam pointed this out to him in the common room. "I accept you into my heart and invite you to find Jesus."

"I don't think Jesus is interested in talking to me," Sam said, "But that's a very nice sentiment. If it makes you feel better, I guess God talking to you is about as likely as The Devil doing his best to annoy me whenever he gets bored." If God talked to this dumb fuck, Sam would eat his hospital-issued slip-on Keds. Not that Sam thought God was a very good judge of character, but there was a difference between a _useful_ fruitcake and a fruitcake you let wind up in the psych ward.

"So The Devil annoys you," Chris said. "Intriguing."

"Mostly by telling me things about his sex life," Sam confided, "which is gross because he looks like a geriatric car salesman from Florida."

"Old people are nasty," Eddie said.

"I'm going to kill myself before I hit menopause," Temperance added, brushing Eddie's hair serenely.

"It's good to have goals," Sam agreed.

"Nobody here is going to kill themselves and nobody here is going to have goals," an orderly corrected absently.

"We should _totally_ have goals," Sam murmured. "Here's my goal: to be able to scratch my balls if I need to tonight instead of having to wait nine hours."

"My goal is to perfect the art of puking so none of it actually touches my tongue," whispered Temperance.

Eddie laughed. "My goal is to discover something that no one has ever gotten high off of before and get totally crunked on it."

"My goal is to eradicate the word 'crunk' from common usage," said Mark. Eddie stuck his tongue out at him.

"Nobody is getting crunked on anything," said the dumpy woman Sam had seen the day before. "At least not before you do arts and crafts."

"_Seriously_?" Sam asked, appalled. A mediocre high school experience had prepared him for not being heralded as one of the best and brightest, but this was getting a little too short-bus preschooler for comfort.

"GLITTER!" shouted Eddie, throwing his hands up in the air and running out of the room.

"Somebody please catch up with him," the woman said tiredly, "before he tries to eat the Elmer's again."

Sam rubbed his forehead and joined the mindless shuffle following Eddie. He couldn't believe they thought he was on the same _level_ as these people. When he got out of here he was going burn this place to the goddamn ground, with these after-school-special rejects and their brain-dead zoo keepers trapped inside. It would be glorious. He would bring marshmallows.

Mary was already sitting in the cafeteria when Sam and the others were herded in, using brightly-colored safety-scissors to cut out an army of construction-paper angels.

"Hello, Satan," she said darkly.

Sam tried to turn his head in both directions at once, tripped over a chair and fell down. "Where?!" he asked from the floor.

"She's talking to _you_," Eddie explained patiently. From down here Sam could see him hiding snortable art supplies in the waistband of his pants. _Oh_.

"Satan wouldn't have barfed on you," Sam told Mary, staggering to his feet. "He would have arranged for _you_ to barf on _yourself_. He's classy like that."

"It was a really admirable technique," Temperance commented. "You didn't have to use your finger or anything."

"It's a skill," Sam admitted. "One that got me out of high school gym class many times."

"Vomiting isn't a skill," an orderly reminded them, moving a dish of paste out of Eddie's reach.

"You're right," Sam agreed, "It's really more of a calling." He put his hand up to high-five Temperance. She awkwardly touched her palm to his, then looked like she was worried about disease. At least Sam was finally getting the hang of how to amuse himself in a place like this. Enabling the mentally ill was _awesom_e.

"You shouldn't be proud of your infirmities," Mary complained. "You're supposed to rise above them here."

"_You're_ proud of being a bitch," Sam argued. "But you should be! I can tell you put a lot of effort into it."

"Nobody here is a bitch," said one of the nurses, "And no one here should be proud of anything."

"Listen, though," Sam said, stealing Mary's safety scissors, "Just because we aren't like the people outside doesn't make us inferior to them. If we have different values than what our preachers and parents and televisions have been telling us to have, why is that bad?"

"Exactly," Eddie said.

"This isn't the place for this discussion," said the dumpy woman, "and you're not allowed to have those," she pointed to the safety scissors.

"Why?" Sam said. "If it's in my nature to be destructive, why is that less legit than being so naturally passive that I let destructive things just _happen_ around me, like all those people on the outside? If it's in my nature to be self-destructive, whose right is it to tell me I'm wrong just because they don't want to clean up the mess when I'm done?"

"He has a point," Mark said, waving a pipecleaner.

"If my destructive nature and someone else's self-destructive nature collide, why is that less fortuitous than two people becoming friends, or falling in love, or doing something great together?" Sam asked. "Mark, I'm going to stab you with these safety scissors, let's see if you actually die."

"Nobody's going to stab anybody," an orderly said, clamping both hands down on Sam's shoulders. Sam tossed the safety scissors to Chris.

"Suicide is a sin in the eyes of the Lord," Chris said to Mark, "but to be a martyr is holy!" He pretended to stab the safety scissors into Mark's stomach.

"Oh, you got me!" Mark cried, falling out of his chair. "Goodbye, cruel world!"

Everyone cheered. The woman made an angry face, scowling down at Mark's theatrical death throes.

Sam wondered if you could kill someone with pipecleaners—like if you shoved the metal insides far enough up their nostrils, would there just be a lot of blood or what? He began peeling the fuzz off of them and twisting the metal together. You never knew unless you tried. Also it looked like he really wasn't going to get those safety scissors back.

--

"We hope you don't mind someone sitting in on this," the orderly said, "but he's been a little unpredictable about visitors." Sam thought about what snapping bones sounded like, and wished for a baseball bat.

Compared to the slightly underfed, hollow-eyed look that the female patients at West Seattle all seemed to have developed Andi was hotter than ever, and Sam was glad to see her for that reason. But her ready acceptance of having a burly hospital worker sit two feet away from them, ready to pounce on Sam at the slightest sign of violence, was kind of a downer. Apparently conjugal nookie wasn't Andi's thing.

"I always thought this would be the other way around," she told him, sounding unattractively congested. "What _happened_ to you, Sam?"

"Scientology?" Sam tried, "I guess I thought being a crazy was part of the deal, but nobody's sent Tom Cruise to the nuthouse so I think I might have gotten my ass scammed. Figures."

"Sam, please," she begged. God, she was doing his mom's crying thing. He wished she'd stop, it was making her face all blotchy. He could vaguely remember thinking that Andi could never be ugly, but this scrunchy-faced wet thing was really disproving that theory for him.

"Aw, Andi, c'mon," he said, and opened his arms, beckoning her over. She collapsed against him, which was a relief because looking at her face had been kind of gross right then. The orderly tensed and gave him a stern look. "I am sorry," Sam said, trying a new tactic, "I _never_ knew you'd react like this."

"Ben says you tried to kill him!" she cried.

Sam remained silent. He had tried defending that particular move before and it hadn't worked out so hot, and he couldn't figure out a way to explain needing to dispatch of a mutual friend for reasons of self-preservation. "I just don't understand," she continued.

"That makes two of us," Sam said somberly. "And your remorse has made me reconsider my actions entirely, and I promise to reform myself for you."

"Really?" she choked, sounding even more confused.

"Sure, if that's the answer that gets you to make-out with me," Sam said. She punched him in the chest, hard, and started crying again. Also pretty hard. Sam rolled his eyes. "Will you please stop with the crying thing? If you really want to waste bodily fluids, I can think of a better way, trust me. You don't seriously expect me to believe you're this broken up about a little change in personal philosophy," Sam scoffed.

"How can you not take this seriously?" Andi demanded angrily. "You're like a complete stranger, Sam!"

Sam looked at her, uncertain if he should bother explaining that he could barely remember what life had been like before a few days ago, much less what kind of person he had supposedly been. A pretty pathetic one, he was sure. "I am taking my situation very seriously," he said, "I'm the one who has to live through it, in case you hadn't noticed. But I'm perfectly happy with myself. It's everyone else who's the problem, and you can't blame me for trying to correct that problem, can you?"

She looked him straight in the eyes. "And how are you correcting the problem, Sam?" she asked, apparently quite serious.

"Well, I haven't had much time to experiment," Sam admitted, "But I think I'm already pretty fond of strangulation. Also, I want to try burying someone alive?" Andi was making a curiously blank face that Sam had no reference for and couldn't interpret. "It's kind of a culmination of my childhood dream of digging a hole to China and my current dream of listening to worthless wastes of space flip their shit."

"You're a _monster_, Sam," she said.

Sam couldn't find it in himself to be disturbed or particularly moved by that statement, although she seemed convinced it was true. "All right," he shrugged, "it's probably better than the alternative. You people aren't making much of a case for humanity, I gotta tell you."

And now she was standing up angrily, which probably meant that had been the wrong thing to say. Sam's ability to predict other people's behavior was patchy at best these days.

"Ben and Sock are still worried sick about you, you know," she spat, rummaging in her shoulder bag, "I think your crazy rubbed off on them a little, they're researching something about Danish hat circles and dead chickens and they told me--," she found what she was looking for, and threw it at his feet, "—to give you this, and I guess you probably really need it, even in _here_."

It was the vessel. The orderly was eyeing it curiously.

"And I hope you rot in hell, Sam Oliver," she finished viciously, tossing it out over her shoulder like she thought he'd really care what she hoped for.

"You can count on it!" he called after her.

--

A plan had once again formed almost by itself in the back of Sam's head, despite the drugs and distractions and stifling effect of having complete strangers watching him constantly. Not that there wasn't plenty of reason to watch him, Sam was sure he was totally fascinating, but it meant he had to watch them, too, and that inevitably led to thinking of new and inventive ways to kill each of them—with arts and crafts, home and gardening supplies, his bare hands, with other people's dismembered body parts, it was kind of endless— and indulging in the slightly less interesting alternative of encouraging terrible behavior in the hopes that it would have the same end result.

"What do they do to you if you just refuse to eat?" Sam asked Temperance, who was picking listlessly at something that might have once been potatoes, sometime around when they'd been packaged, probably during the Cold War. Sam thought age gave them character, but he suspected she felt differently. "Don't they just have to hook you up to an IV, then? Wouldn't you technically prefer that, since it's, like, the ultimate streamlining of the nutrition process?"

"If I don't eat I lose my privileges," Temperance said.

"_What privileges_?" Sam asked, gesturing vaguely at their surroundings. "If we were any more strictly controlled we'd be in a gulag. A gulag where they pretend to like you, which is kind of worse."

"Nobody's pretending anything here," a nurse corrected calmly.

"Yes, true," Sam conceded, pulling back a bit. He didn't want to step out of line until he had a sufficient number of people stepping out of line in front of him. "Pretending is a valuable life skill possessed only by functioning lobotomy patients-- I mean 'normal people,' sorry." A few people looked close to laughter, but that wasn't good enough. "I guess maybe it's comforting to know that with the food, at least they're not _trying_ to poison you, Temperance. It's just an unfortunate side-effect."

"Does somebody need an escorted trip back to their room?" one of the orderlies asked pointedly, looming over Sam's shoulder.

"Somebody somewhere, in the infinite vastness of possibility," Sam said. "But not me, if that's what you're implying."

"At least he's honest about it," Temperance said, scowling at her plate even harder than before. "Everyone here wants me to die. I'm going to _die_."

"We're all going to die," said Mark easily. Someone down the table that Sam didn't know cheered lightly.

"Just pretend it's Dr. Howard's cock," giggled Eddie, "then you'll have no trouble swallowing."

"_That's inappropriate_," Mary said.

One of the staff was trying to say something boring that would involve enforced quiet time but Sam had just hit upon exactly what he needed from these idiots. He dug his fork into the table and leaned forward excitedly.

"That's totally appropriate. It's the most appropriate thing ever. Eat this bread for it is my flesh, yeah, Chris?"

"And drink this wine for it is my blood," Chris agreed.

"Or in our case, 'drink this Kool-Aid, it is my Holy fuckin' jizz," Sam needled gleefully. "Because what is a head shrink except someone who seeks to be like God?"

"A false prophet," Chris agreed. "In league with the Devil."

"A false idol, a phony god, trying to control the Heavens and the Earth in his little microcosm of _misery_!" Sam elaborated. "Every day a test of your blind faith, and every meal a Last Supper, enforcing his will on you until you're nothing but what they want you to be. What _he_ wants you to be."

The staff was trying to settle things down again but Sam had finally gotten his teeth into the universal weakness of this particular set of losers, these mindless sheep, and it was their irrational grandiose delusions and their indiscriminate paranoia. And Sam was going to milk that for all it was worth.

"Reject false gods!" Sam bellowed, his voice rising above the growing clamor of panicking, excitable psychiatric patients. "Reject their temptations and their gifts!"

And, having made his point, he catapulted a forkful of instant mashed potatoes into an orderly's face.

Events proceeded logically from there.

--

"You are the most insane insane person we have ever had here," growled one of the orderlies, cheesy broccoli still stuck to his collar and reconstituted potato cementing in his hair.

"You cannot blame me for this!" Sam cried. "I am the least accountable person involved! I wasn't even in the room for most of what happened!"

"Because you left, you little shit," snarled the second orderly, who had taken a pork chop to the eye and still couldn't open it all the way. "I don't know what you're really up to but I don't like it."

"I didn't hold a gun to anybody's head and tell them to start slinging snack food at each other. You can't hold me responsible for the actions of others," Sam complained, grabbing the doorframe on the way into his room and holding on for all he was worth.

"You convinced nearly twenty people that dinner was _severed body parts_!"

"In my defense, at least I didn't convince them to attack you—," they succeeded in prying him from the doorframe and Sam grunted unhappily, "—with actual severed body parts."

"You know," said the first orderly, unsnapping the right-hand restraint on Sam's bed, "if anybody could do that, I truly believe that it would be you." Sam stopped trying to convince them with words and made his argument by biting someone's elbow. Getting his ass four-pointed again was not part of the plan.

"Really impressive dry-cleaning bill aside," Sam panted, "this is kind of an overreaction to something that didn't even involve blood."

"You are having a detrimental effect on your fellow patients," the one-eyed orderly scowled. "The only person who's going to get an earful of your forked tongue tonight is Jamie."

"Maybe we should move him, actually," said the other orderly nervously. "Remember in _Silence of the Lambs_, when Hannibal Lector convinces that guy to swallow his own tongue?"

"I am way better-looking than Anthony Hopkins," Sam argued. "Do not compare me to him."

"Nah," said One-Eye, rubbing his face tiredly. "Jamie is so depressed even negative outside input doesn't make him blink. He's the one person we _don't_ have to worry about. Not until he finally grows roots into his mattress, anyway. Let's clock out and get a beer."

And then they were leaving the room, discussing decontamination options and which bar to go to, reminding Sam all too suddenly that shifts were about to change and that meant…

… that meant Mikey would be here soon.

"Come back here, you fucks!" Sam shouted. "_If I wake up dead it's going to be all your fault_! Shit!" His half-formed plan had been to hide somewhere during the ensuing chaos of a religious paranoia-fueled food fight and then just bag and tag—or just bag, or vesselize, or whatever—the soul as soon as he showed up for work, but he had severely underestimated just how much of an annoyance he'd made himself here.

He shook his head back and forth, trying to coax out the Vessel he'd hidden underneath his pillow. "Jamie," he croaked, "if you have one tiny, tiny little speck of energy to devote to not being a lazy, apathetic asshole, now would be the time to employ it. Seriously, _seriously_. Undo one restraint, and… and I'll kill you _for_ you." Sam lifted his head as far up as it would go to look at his roommate. Those orderlies had underestimated the power of one incredibly determined soulless bounty hunter for Hell. If he could sell drugs to kids and frame his boss, he could goddamn well kill someone who already wanted to die anyway.

"It would be so easy," Sam crooned softly. "So easy. Like sleeping forever," he said reassuringly, lying like he had never lied before and only feeling a sort of twisted elation at the irony of someone who had undeniable proof of the afterlife promising freedom from existence. "Like turning out the lights. Everything outside of you goes away. Everything _in_side of you goes away. I _know_ what you want. I can _give_ it to you."

Jamie's head lolled to the side. For anyone else it would have been a sleepy gesture, but Sam knew he had the other man's full attention. Dull eyes focused, for possibly the first time in days, on Sam's right wrist.

"One thing," Sam whispered, knowing instinctively that he had to keep up his stream of words or the fragile thing he was weaving here would disintegrate, "Just one more thing you have to push yourself to do. And then it can be _over_, forever, for _good_."

In the dim light from the doorway, Sam could see Jamie's hand twitch.

Then the light disappeared.

Because Mikey was standing in front of it.

Jamie stilled. Sam felt a hollow thrum of fear inside his chest.

"You're the person they sent to collect me?" Mikey asked, closing the door softly behind him. "What are you, like on a work-release program?"

Sam's eyes hadn't adjusted yet. He stayed quiet.

"It's just," he could hear something moving at the side of his bed, "You don't seem any better than me. Or anyone else I met down in Hell."

"You're an Escaped Soul," Sam said, in a tone that sounded surprisingly patronizing despite his fear of impending death. "I just don't have one. It's different."

"Everyone has a soul," Mikey said, sounding genuinely confused.

"I _have_ one," Sam said. "But it's in storage."

Sam could begin to see the dim outline of the Soul in the low, blue light creeping through the window. Mikey's head tilted to the left. "What, for safe-keeping?"

"Maybe," Sam said. "The thing about not having a soul is I don't really _care_ I don't have one. So I haven't really put much thought into it."

Mikey was silent for a moment. "Do you know what Jamie's Cardinal sin is?" he asked.

If anything, this cordial polite shit was making Sam even more nervous.

"Uh, suicide? That gets filed under Wrath, right?" Sam guessed.

"_Sloth_," Mikey said, as if gifting Sam with some kind of amazing revelation. Like Sam cared. Hell was pretty much Hell any way you sliced it, as far as he knew.

"I guess lying around in bed all day is about as slothful as you can get," Sam agreed warily.

"Our understanding of sloth has changed, you know," Mikey continued. "It used to be more accurate—it used to be the sin of _despair_. Not just casual apathy and… and unwillingness to work, but an unwillingness to appreciate life. Melancholy."

Sam was trying to pay attention, he really was, he really should be, but _god_ this Soul was boring. Like Sam wanted a history lesson? He could feel one of the straps on the Vessel against the back of his neck. He was technically touching the vessel. _Please work_, Sam thought. _Vessel powers activate! Go-Go-Gadget Straitjacket!_

"You don't think that's unfair?" Mikey asked leadingly. "Maybe it is. Dooming people to Hell for a chemical imbalance they were born with."

"Well, The Devil has a Xanax prescription," Sam offered. "I dunno what your problem was after you came here, Mikey, but you probably went to Hell because you killed your parents before you ever even set foot in this place."

"But that wasn't my fault!" Mikey argued, suddenly with a vicious edge. "That's why they put me here! I killed mom and dad because I was sick, and nobody knew to help me until it was too late, and it wasn't my fault because they should have known. How could I fight that? Is my being born with a problem in my brain any different than your situation?"

He stepped away from Sam's bed. Towards Jamie. "We have the same goals, after all."

Sam's vision was finally as adjusted as it was ever going to be. In the pale blue light, Mikey raised his right hand.

"I was sick, you know. And there wasn't really a cure," he said. "So the doctor assigned to my case eventually decided that there was only one way to set me free. To cure me." He smiled.

It wasn't a nice smile, even Sam could still tell that.

"She didn't know what was on the other side. Neither does Jamie, here. Or he'd be out there, at least trying. He doesn't appreciate the gift he has. No one does, until it's too late."

Mikey cradled Jamie's limp forearm in one hand, and ran the tip of his right index finger up and down the vein there. Jamie's eyes were unfocused again. Sam watched impassively, knowing more or less where this was going now, although still not sure how it was going to get there.

Mikey cleared that up.

At first it just looked like his finger was pressing down, hard, on the thick blue line in the center of Jamie's wrist. But then a wet, dull noise and Sam could see Mikey's fingertip, like a fat worm under the skin, inching sluggishly up Jamie's arm.

Jamie's eyes were wide. His mouth opened, shaping a silent word that Sam couldn't read. He looked terrified, and Sam had to agree that no one ever did appreciate how much they wanted _not_ to die until it was too late.

"In the morning," Mikey said quietly, "They're going to find him, long gone. Respiratory arrest, you know." Jamie seized once. "Overdosed on a cocktail of sedative-hypnotics. More drugs than you ever would have thought could be in someone's system."

Sam had been planning on doing the job with a simple pillow over the face, but Mikey's method worked too, he guessed.

"I'm just an orderly," the Soul finished. "So someone else is going to have to take the blame." He smiled. "What goes around comes around."

He finally withdrew his finger, dripping with blood and some clear fluid not unlike the things they had put in Sam's IV bag at the hospital.

"What's going to be hard, though," Mikey said tiredly, "Is explaining how both of you--"

A loud boom thundered in the hallway.

And somebody shouted, "EAT MY DICK!"

It sounded like Eddie.

One of the other night shift orderlies swung the door open and barked at Mikey to come help, quick, and Sam could suddenly hear a lot of yelling and doors slamming and, if he wasn't mistaken, wild hooting.

Mikey left, with only a hurried glance backwards. Sam guessed he didn't really pose much of a threat right now. He eyed Jamie's still-twitching, not-quite-dead but well-on-its-way body; he hadn't felt much watching what Mikey had just done but he didn't really want to go out the same way.

Chris tumbled into the room.

Sam stared at him. Out in the hall, the yelling was only getting louder and it sounded like something made of glass had just broken.

"Do you swear to fight Satan?" Chris asked fervently.

"What?" Sam asked.

"If I let you go, do you swear to fight The Beast?"

Sam blinked. He wondered what The Devil thought of people calling him a beast.

"_Yes_," Sam said. "Now unstrap me before I end up like Jolly Jamie over there_. I do not want to die_."

Chris did a double-take. "What happened to him?" he asked, sounding kind of really distressed considering he'd probably never even talked to the guy. People were so weird.

"It's the staff, I told you. The orderly that was just in here, he's from Hell. He's killing patients and framing doctors. Now hurry up and let me go!"

"Will you fight him?" Chris demanded, in a comically serious voice.

"That is what I have been trying to do _all along get me the fuck out of here oh my god_!" Sam shouted.

Chris hurriedly began undoing Sam's restraints. As soon as he had one wrist undone Sam started in on the other with his free hand and his teeth. "I want to fight him with you!" Chris said.

Sam fell out of bed, clutching the vessel and wobbling on his feet slightly. "Fine, just keep up."

Out in the hallway, more people than Sam had known were even currently in residence at West Seattle were all flipping their shit. Sam guessed they were probably like dominoes that way, except crazy bite-you, claw-your-eyes-out dominoes.

Dominoes would be fucking badass if the dominoes started fighting you when you tipped them over.

--

"Wait," said Sock. "Not yet."

"What?" Ben asked apprehensively, holding the dead chicken in front of him like it might try to bite at any moment—which it might, Ben wasn't really very clear on what happened to the chicken during this ritual—and looking vaguely nauseous.

"Too much," Sock slurred slightly, "Of the… somethin'." He waved the bottle he'd been holding for the past hour back and forth uncertainly. Before this bottle there had been other bottles. Pretty much all day long since Ben had told Sock about his plan to get Sam's soul back. "I have to pee," Sock said.

"You cannot pee here!" Ben said sharply.

"But I have to _go_!" Sock said plaintively. "If I don't now it's, like, ninety percent more likely that I am going to piddle myself when El Diablo shows up."

Ben covered his face with the hand that was not covered in chicken blood and groaned.

"Benji," Sock continued, "Wetting your pants in front of the enemy takes a lot out of your bargaining whatever. Of your. Of your _seriousability_."

"There is nowhere to pee here that does not qualify as grave desecration, Sock!" Ben hissed.

Sock looked around him worriedly. "What if I pee near the baby graves? Like, even if a baby comes back from the dead to haunt you, pretty much all it can do is cry and puke, right? So I'm cool."

"You should do your business by that big one over there," someone said. Ben dropped the chicken in shock.

"It's nice-looking up top," the stranger continued pleasantly, "But buried below it is one bad man. Child rapist, you know. Also, a Cubs fan." He shuddered theatrically.

"Are you… the Funeral Director?" Ben asked, a terrible answer already forming in the back of his mind. A few of the toads were making a break for freedom. Sock made an uncertain noise in the back of his throat.

"No," the man replied, and then gave a funny little bow, flourishing with his left hand. "But I believe you wanted to speak with me?"

--

They caught up with Mikey Nelson in a hallway Sam hadn't even known existed, in a patient's room. Most of the orderlies had been focusing on the impromptu barricade that Eddie had somehow orchestrated in the common room. It wasn't actually a very effective barricade but sheer numbers and the intense sudden energy that had seized the patients of West Seattle was, thus far, more than enough.

When Mikey had spotted Sam out of bed, though, he'd known well enough to run.

"Don't let him escape, Nessie!" Chris shouted at the large black man who apparently occupied this room. The man's impressive dinner-plate sized hand easily batted the Soul back from where he had been frantically scrabbling at the window. Unlike the rest of the windows in the building, it looked like it actually might open if you tried hard enough, which Sam supposed had to do with the fact that _Nessie_, whatever his problem was, didn't look too interested in going much of anywhere, and if he wanted to there wouldn't have been much to stop him.

Except maybe Mikey's tricky fingers. Nessie howled in confusion when the Soul jammed a finger into his shoulder.

Chris was dragging the Soul off in a flash, and fell to the ground kicking and clawing for all he was worth, shouting about Jesus and a Holy War and something about halberds. Sam began unstrapping the Vessels many straps. Nessie was crying. In the direction of the common room, something that might have been an explosion happened.

But Mikey's fingers were flying fast, and although Chris being nothing if not enthusiastic meant the Soul's drug needle appendages weren't staying in _long_, they were going in a _lot_. Which meant Sam did not have a lot of time left before those fingers started aiming for him. He opened the jacket and leapt on Mikey's back.

"Get his arms inside!" he shouted. Mikey screamed. Nessie, still crying pitifully, gave him a firm whack upside the head.

Sam could see why these things had gone out of favor, they were a bitch and a half to do up, but Nessie had given them the upper hand with his distraction and Sam could feel the Vessel starting to work as he yanked the long ends of both sleeves around Mikey Nelson's back.

Chris stumbled back as Sam did up the last knot. Mikey was screeching at the top of his lungs, a violent awful noise that rose to an inhuman pitch as the Vessel began to crackle and glow, and then it swallowed him whole and the noise stopped.

And he was gone. The jacket, still fully tied, fluttered to the floor.

Chris stared at it. Then choked a little. It looked like he might be foaming at the mouth a bit. Sam grimaced. Chris toppled over.

Well, it was what he would have wanted. Sam picked up the Vessel, then looked at Nessie. He did not want to kill this man. Mostly because he didn't think he _could_.

"This never happened," he said firmly.

"President Kennedy!" Nessie said, sounding delighted. "I thought you were _dead_!"

Sam stopped worrying.

--

Sam watched the sun rise from the roof of West Seattle Psychiatric.

He'd tried to leave out the front door but that had proved to be difficult, since the few orderlies not focusing on reining in the patients' ecstatic revolt had apparently anticipated an escape attempt and taken up posts at every available exit. Sam was fine with waiting up here until the coast was clear. The view was better than the one at the condo, and if he laid low for a while maybe they would come to their own conclusions as to why two patients were dead and one orderly had mysteriously vanished. Conclusions that didn't involve him being stuck here much longer.

"That was really something, you know," The Devil said.

He hadn't been standing next to Sam a second ago, but he was now, leaning against the wall of the roof stairwell and looking as smug as he always did, which was a relief.

"_There_ you are," Sam said. "I was beginning to think you'd gotten bored of messing with me."

"Bored?" The Devil laughed. "Sammy, without a doubt, I haven't laughed this much since…" He stopped to think. "Well, since the first time you tried to capture a Soul, I suppose. You're better than reality television, you know! Like if _Fear Factor_ and _The Simple Life_ met and had deformed love child… that's what watching you is like."

"So, what?" Sam asked, wondering idly if Paris Hilton's parents had sold her soul. It would explain a lot. "You've just been enjoying the show?"

"I guess you could say that," The Devil nodded. "Although to be honest, I just didn't trust myself not to give away the surprise ending."

Sam blinked. "The surprise ending?"

"You know," The Devil said, "the punch-line." He paused, as if waiting to see if Sam would cotton on.

"You didn't think this was _it_, did you, Sammy? _No_! This has just been the elaborate set-up. A man walks into a bar, says to the bartender… yeah? You get it?"

The Devil smiled wider.

"Soul and spunk, Sammy," he said. "Do you remember that? I can take one, but not the other? I was never going to take your Soul from you for _good_, though. You've got places to go, things to do, and you're going to need your Soul for that. Eventually."

"I don't want my Soul back," Sam told him, frowning.

"I know you don't," The Devil said apologetically. "That's the point. Sorry, buddy, but some lessons have to be learned. It's a little crude, I admit, the rolled-up-newspaper approach-- but I find it's the most effective method for certain _qualified_ candidates."

And he was still smiling, but Sam could see the too-sharp edge to it now and the dizzy itch of fear was back.

The Devil produced a jar from inside his suit. Sam's soul was still inside it. It didn't look any smaller or less bright than it had before, but now it made him think of jagged rocks around lighthouses, and headlights on a highway after dark.

"Please, please, please," he said, shakily, "no."

"Come on now," The Devil chided, "that's no way to greet an old friend, is it?"

If you had asked Sam four days ago which would be a more horrifying experience-- losing your soul or getting your soul _back_-- Sam wouldn't have paused to think about it. Sam didn't need to think about it now, either: losing his Soul had been like a bad horror movie, but getting it back was so terrifying that Sam is not entirely sure how it happened. One moment The Devil was looming over him, a smirk on his face and a hand on the lid of the jar, and the next moment Sam had his Soul back, like it never left, only it _had_, for _days_, and Sam feels like he is _dying_.

On his hands and knees on the roof of West Seattle Psychiatric, Sam Oliver made a noise not unlike the one Mikey Nelson had made being sucked into his Vessel a few hours before.

"I hear it can smart a little bit going back in," The Devil commiserated. "They weren't really designed to be moved around like that. But you'll live."

Sam choked back a sob. He couldn't think of anything to say, except _I'm sorry,_ and The Devil wasn't the person he should be saying that to. But he wasn't ever going to get a chance to say it to the people he most wanted to say it to, and he wasn't sure he'd be able to face the people he still _could_ apologize to.

"Hey," The Devil said, "it's not your fault, right? The Devil made you do it."

Sam realized he'd been saying _I'm sorry_ over and over again out-loud anyway, without meaning to. He stopped, tilted his face up.

"I _hate_ you," he said. "_I hate you_."

"No, you don't," The Devil corrected calmly, taking Sam's hand and hauling him to his feet. "For the next few months at _least_, Sammy, you're going to be too busy hating _yourself_."

That was probably true. Sam knew, distantly, that he was angry and that The Devil was to blame, just like he almost always was, but that didn't stop the writhing, agonizing _thing_ that was making itself at home in his chest again. It was like being hit by a train over and over again. And knowing you deserved every moment, every shock of near-physical pain, every gut-wrenching, mind-shattering lick of self-loathing.

The Devil slung his arm around Sam's shoulders and led him back to the stairwell. "I've straightened this whole mess out for you, you know," he continued warmly. "You can go home now. Take a load off, relax a little, then swing by the DMV and drop off Mikey. And some good stuff has come of this, right?" He shook Sam a little, affectionately. "You got some skeeball in. You learned about your public library system! You can't put a price on knowledge, Sam. You finally quit that crappy job you had! Or at least, I don't think you should bother reapplying." Sam felt sick to his stomach. "And hey, your friends proved their loyalty to you. How great is _that_?"

"I tried to kill one of them," Sam said brokenly. "They're never going to _talk_ to me again."

"What?" The Devil said, disbelievingly. "Of course they are. They made the ultimate sacrifice for you, Sammy. That's true friendship. And the three of you have a lot in common now, you know."

Sam stopped cold on the stairs.

"Oh, right," The Devil chuckled. "I might have forgotten to tell them that you were getting your Soul back anyway, and, well. They're not very good at bargaining."

He beamed.

"They sold _their_ souls just to get _yours_ back in your corporeal body, Sam! I tell you," The Devil shook his head fondly, "I couldn't plan details like that if I _tried_."

--

I don't own Reaper, am in no way affiliated with the CW, and wouldn't take responsibility for the View Askewniverse if you paid me. Apologies to Seattle, librarians, the entire field of psychiatry and mental health workers, and organized religion.

Thanks to Jill, who caught a lot of mistakes I wouldn't have while I was writing this, and patiently reassured me that I was actually writing something and not just slamming the keys over and over again in a delusional fit of psychosis. I hope you're real and not a figment of my imagination, Jill! You're a classy lady.

Angry fist-shaking at the Television Without Pity Reaper regulars, who are directly responsible for this tragedy. You guys can suck it.


End file.
